A pleasing land of drowsy head it was
Of dreams that wave before the half shut eye,
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass
Forever flushing round a summer sky.
Thomson.

MR. WHITE,—It is a long time since I threw my mite into the treasury of your book; Nugator's occupation's gone! was my ejaculation when last I wrote to you. The same devouring element which has recently plunged New York in misery and gloom, had just then triumphed over much of my earthly possessions, but over none more foolishly prized than sundry small wares which were intended for your market. As there was no prospect of getting Congress to extend the time of the payment of my bonds, to which one would think I was as justly entitled as the rich merchant, I had to set to work as best I might to repair the ravages of fire. In the midst of saws and hammers, of bricks and mortar, my ideas have been so vulgarized, that you must not expect to see a Phoenix rise from my ashes. From me you must never expect any thing but trifles, as my signature portends; yet when I reflect that this world is made up of small things as well as great, and that the former are as essential to constitute a whole as the latter, and that your book ought no more than the world to consist altogether of the grand, but should sometimes admit the trifling, I am encouraged to begin again, although already scorched by more fires than one, having encountered the fire of some of your critics. As the mouse sets off to greater advantage the bulk of the mammoth, the critics should rather be pleased than otherwise, to see my wretched skeleton in contrast with the vast proportions of some of your contributors,—but enough.

Romances and novels made my neighbor Castellanus a castle-builder; nothing can be more dissimilar than the world he inhabits and that ideal one in which he has always lived; like certain persons who shall be nameless, he has been literally in the world and out of it at the same time, and his experience therefore might justify a seeming paradox. I think it was Godwin in his Fleetwood, who drew so beautiful a contrast between our night dreams and day dreams. Castellanus never could bear the former, attended by hag and night mare, where we are forever struggling to attain some goal, which we can never reach; he did not like to start affrighted out of sleep; to sink through chasms yawning beneath his feet;

"Nor toss on shatter'd plank far out upon some deep."

No, I have heard him exclaim, "Give me the dreams of day; let me recline upon some bank in summer shade, supine, where fancy fits her wings for pleasant flight, and quickly ushers me into her radiant halls. No hope defeated can there make me grieve; no cup untasted from my lips be dashed; no light, receding ever, there can shine, but whatsoever there be of joy or love to mortals known, is seized at once and easily made my own." There are few persons, perhaps, who do not at some period of life, construct these gay castles, yclept in air, and well indeed is the appellation bestowed, for though more splendid far than the works of old; more passing rare than all of which we read;—Balbec's! Palmyra's!—none could excel them,—yet in a moment they will topple down, nor leave one marble column, spared as if to point to the scene of desolation and to mourn for its brethren, broken, ruined, and overthrown. Such monuments are sometimes seen standing amid that decay, produced by Goths and Vandals; and Goths and Vandals still in modern times will break, irruptive, on the castle-builder's chosen spot—misfortunes! griefs! pale care! tormenting debt!—Then fancy, all thy revelry is forgotten; reluctantly from our sweet couch, we rise and homeward frowning hie to toil and writhe and fret. But such is the skill of the artist, that he has but to ramble forth where all is still and wave his wand, when in an instant, like the enchantment of old, his shining palaces will upward climb. It is not so, alas! with those works barbarians overturned; none know how to raise them to such sublime heights; lost are those arts by which they towering rose, and we but gaze on them to sigh and curse the hands which slew them.

This practice of castle-building had been the habit of Castellanus from his boyhood. It gave him a strange unsocial turn and made him shun the inmates of his father's house. He fled all company, and the pleasures which others pursue were rarely pleasures to him. One enjoyment he had which never palled. Some lonely seat beside a "wimpling burn" or waterfall, where human sounds fell distantly; there with book in hand, he drank in the lulling music with which such a place is fraught; there would he draw forth, unseen, some old romance with worn and dusky lid, of "haunted Priories" with bloody hand, or dark "Udolpho" with its deep mysteries, its gliding ghosts, and secret pannels. Then would fall the curtain on this mortal vale and all its hateful realities, and his rapt soul would revel in the high wrought tale of fancy. For him these fictions had an unspeakable charm—gallant youths were his companions. He trod with them over Alps and Appenines, where banditti lurked amid the dreary forests and lights were seen to glance and disappear. Soft maidens, too, were there, whose superhuman charms won every heart; encompassed by ten thousand dangers, he could not leave them, until he saw them safely locked in love's triumphant arms. Though a very ugly fellow, he had deceived himself into the belief that he should one day or other marry one of these delightful creatures, and had even settled that her name should be Julia, and thought he should be one of the happiest fellows upon earth; but, Mr. Editor, who do you think he now is? a clodhopper!! aye a miserable clodhopper! The owner of land and negroes!! In that one sentence, I sum up all of human misery—and what do you think is his wife's name? Peggy! Phœbus what a name!

"Cobblers! take warning by this cobbler's end."

Yes, ye castle-builders! look upon his undone condition and take warning. Take warning, parents, and bring up your children to suit the sphere in which they are to move. I shall not trouble you with the why and the wherefore of his present condition, but suffice it to say that such it is, and then picture to yourself the untold miseries he must endure when I depict to you the sort of life he is leading, with such passions as I have already described his ruling ones to be. Imprimis: there is Peg—but I had better say as little as possible of her, out of respect for the ladies and out of regard for my friend, because in truth like "Jerry Sneak," he has not eaten a "bit of under crust since he was married," but follow me if you please upon his farm, and let me introduce you to his plagues and tormentors. Let us look for the overseer—we shall find him, if at home, which is seldom the case, seated on a stump, with the symbol of his office under his arm. There he is, you see, mounted on his throne lazily looking at the laborers; working the land to death by injudicious cultivation; extorting the last drop of vitality from it; a foe to every species of improvement, and obstinately bent upon going on in the jog trot of his predecessors. This is Castellanus' companion ex necessitate. Shades of the Orvilles and Mortimers! pity him. What can there be in common between them? What can they talk about? About Evelina and Amanda?—cottages covered with woodbine and honeysuckle?—landscapes and glorious sunsets?—the warbling of birds?—Oh no, Suk and Sall, negro cabins or pig-styes, corn fields and——yes, they can talk of birds, but they are blackbirds and crows, and devil take their warbling—of sunset, but only to lament the shortness of the days. His (the overseer's) themes are rogues and runaways—he is eloquent upon hog-stealing, and neither Simon Sensitive nor Timothy Testy could recount more readily the miseries of human life. His are the miseries of Geoponies. Rot—rust—weevil—fly and cutworm, haunt his imagination and dwell upon his tongue. Castellanus had rather be a dog and bay the moon than discuss such subjects. But my friend's delight was once in horses; it was one of the few pleasures he had. His fancy was early captivated by Alexander mounting Bucephalus; a horse gaily caparisoned and mounted by a steel clad knight, was a sight upon which his imagination feasted. The red roan charger of Marmion at the battle of Flodden had thrilled his every nerve,

"Blood shot his eyes—his nostril spread
The loose rein, dangling from his head
Housing and saddle bloody red."

Oh what a picture! and that I should be obliged to exhibit to your view the counterfeit presentment. The ploughboys are just coming out of the stable with their master's horses going to plough. Here, sir, is Buck-e-fallus, as the negro boys call Bucephalus. There is no difficulty in mounting him; they have knocked out one of his eyes; he has a blind side and cannot see the shadow cast by the sun. If his spirit was ever as high as his namesake's, he has lost it now—that little ragged urchin can ride him with a grape-vine—raw-boned, spavined and wind-galled! let him pass and let us see the next. This is Smiler! "Lucus a non lucendo," I suppose; alas! he never smiles—he reminds one of Irving's wall eyed horse looking out of the stable window on a rainy day. His look is disconsolate in the extreme; from the imperturbable gravity of his manners, you perceive he is dead to hope; melancholy has marked him for her own; bad feeding, constant toil, and a lost currycomb, have made him "what thou well may'st hate," although he once "set down" as "shapely a shank" as Burns' Auld mare Maggie ever did. Do you see that long legged fellow, that Brobdignag, mounted upon the little mare mule? His legs almost drag the ground, and he ought in justice to toat (aye, sir, toat, a good word, an excellent word, and one upon which I mean to send you an etymological essay some of these days,) the animal he bestrides. There are some singular traits about that mule Golliver, as the boys by a singular misnomer call her. She keeps fat "while other nags are poor;" it is because she lives in the corn-field. She can open the stable-door by some inscrutable means, some sort of open sessame; gates are no impediments to her, and even ten rails and a rider cannot arrest her progress. She seems to have a vow upon her never to leave the plantation; she will go as far as the outer gate with her rider, but if he attempt to pass that boundary his fate is sealed. He is canted most unceremoniously over her head and made to bite the dust; that gate is her ultima Thule; her ne plus ultra; the utmost bound of her ambition. She has acquaintances enough, as Old Oliver says, and wishes not to extend the circle. Her policy is Chinese, or perhaps like Rasselas, she once escaped from her happy valley and was disappointed in the world—"one fatal remembrance" perhaps casts its "bleak shade" beyond that gate.—I know not in sooth, but heaven help me! what am I doing? If I go on thus, with the whole stud of my neighbor, and write at large upon every thing which torments him, I shall never have done. Suffice it then, that I give you a hasty, panoramic sketch of what he has to encounter in his rides over his farm. See him mounted on his little switch tailed grey, which has the high sounding title of White Surrey, and whose tail is nearly cut off at the root by the crupper—the mane in most admired disorder, and fetlocks long and bushy. Now what does he behold? Barren fields—broken fences—gates unhinged—starving cattle—ragged sheep—and jades so galled that they make him wince—hogs that eat their own pigs and devastate his crops—mares that sometimes cripple their own colts—cows on the contrary which have so much of the milk of vaccine kindness, that they suffer their offspring to suck after being broken to the cart—bulls even, that suck—rams, so pugnacious, that they butt his mules down, as the aforesaid Gulliver can attest, for often have I seen her knocked down as fast as she could rise—upon my life it's true, Mr. Editor, and you need not add with Major Longbow, what will you lay it's a lie? It was amusing to see the ram, with head erect and fixed eye, moving round in a small circle and watching his opportunity to plant his blows, with all the pugilistic dexterity of Crib or Molyneux. I once knew my unfortunate neighbor to have a fine blooded colt, foaled in the pasture with his mules. These vicious devils had no sooner perceived that the colt was without those long ears which characterize their species, than they set to work with one accord to demolish the monstrous production, and in spite of all the efforts of the mother, which fought with a desperation worthy of some old Roman, beset by a host of foes, succeeded in trampling to death her beautiful offspring. What a picture this is of some political zealots and envenomed critics, who no sooner perceive that a man has not asses ears, like themselves, than they commence a senseless outcry against him and compass his destruction. I have somewhere read of a madman, and perhaps he was right, who, when confined, protested he was not mad; that all mankind were madder than he, and that they were envious of his superior intellect and therefore wished to put him out of the way. Castellanus goes to ride out with Cecilia, Camilla, the Children of the Abbey, or some such book in his pocket, and so engrossed is his mind with the elegance and refinement of those personages, that he can scarcely bear to go where his overseer is. He shuns him as much as Lovel did Captain Mirvan, or old Mr. Delville Mr. Briggs. He turns with horror from the pictures of desolation and mismanagement around him, and hastens home to find consolation in the bosom of his heroines, not of his Peggy, for he cannot yet say "Non clamosa mea mulier jam percutit aures"1—and in truth that virtuous lady has a tongue, and with it can ring such a peal about the above mentioned unproductive state of things, that he had rather hear the "grating on a scrannel-reed of wretched straw;"—or, to be less poetical, and to come back to what he hears every day, he had rather listen to the music of his own cart-wheels, which grate so harshly and scream so loudly that they may be heard a mile off. The inevitable result of all I have told you, Mr. Editor, is, that my neighbor is actually sinking three or four per cent. upon his capital every year, and must come to beggary unless you can arouse him from his ridiculous castle-building and novel reading. I wish you could see the style in which he moves with his cara sposa to church; they have come down, as we say, to an old gig, which cannot be quite as old as Noah's ark, because no two of the kind were ever seen in this world, and therefore could not have been preserved at the time of the Deluge, although the brass mountings on the muddy and rain-stiffened harness are of so antique a fashion, that we might well suppose the ingenuity of that celebrated artificer in brass, Tubal Cain, was employed in their construction. This crazy vehicle is drawn by the overseer's horse, which is borrowed for the "nonce,"—because neither Buck-e-fallus nor Smiler, nor any of the stud are fit to go, and Gulliver, besides being a mule, has declined, as I have already shewn, having any thing to do with our "external relations;" and furthermore, because this is the only conceivable mode in which my neighbor can obtain a return for that unlimited control which the said horse exercises over the corn in his corn-house. The contrast between the long lean figure, and rueful and cadaverous countenance of Castellanus, and the short figure resembling "the fat squab upon a Chinese fan," and the ruddy countenance of Mrs. Castellanus, is very striking;