It is pleasant to think that the poets of this generation promise well in bathos, and occasionally display the utmost alacrity in sinking.

POETRY OF CHILDHOOD. The recollections of boyhood, its vexations, miseries, pleasures, aspirations, more naturally fall into the moulds of humor than imagination. A languid recurrence to the past, and the absorption of the mind in the reveries it provokes, oftener indicates the snob than the bard. No great mind goes like a crab, backwards. It is foolish to sentimentalize on infancy and childhood. It can only be done by wilfully detaching from the body of incidents and feelings common to that interesting age, what is graceful and imaginative, and ignoring what in them is laughable. I pity the man who can write verses on his boyhood, and grow morbid on its memories. For my own part, the only thing that makes me patient with the verdancies and follies of my youth, is the material they afford me for a quiet laugh now and then by myself. At the age of twenty I had the good sense to bribe a garrulous nurse, who superintended my infant years, not to breathe a word of my doings and sayings, while she had the melancholy pleasure of my acquaintance. By that means I lost a reputation for precocity, but suppressed all records of my first three years of nonsense and baby-talk.

There is nothing more ridiculous to the mind of manhood, than the intensity with which small things affect the child. I recollect perfectly the day when my guardian bought me a tin money-box, for the preservation of my loose pennies. I was naturally a spendthrift, and looked upon coin as valuable only as the representative of so much gingerbread. But by dint of several long discourses on economy, seasoned with brilliant fibs of little boys who

had amassed fortunes by taking care of their cents, I was prevailed upon to accept the box, and promise to make it the bank of deposite for all the pennies that fortune and benevolence threw into my hands. The next day I obtained a cent. I pondered long and deeply on the propriety of burying it in the bank. I held the box up before my eyes, scrutinized the aperture in the top, and at last slowly and thoughtfully let the coin slip in. The moment it touched the bottom I realized the rashness of the act. Immediately I shook the box furiously to make the cent come out, but to no avail. Then I tried to coax it from its hiding place, turning the box carefully up, so that the cent could peep maliciously at me through the holebut all my insinuating attentions produced no effect; the aperture was contrived to let coppers in, not to let them out. As soon as a careful induction had informed me of the devilish principle on which the infernal machine was contrived, I became almost insane with rage-rushed up and down stairs, rattling the box in a frenzy, and had no peace until I found some tool wherewith to pry off the cover, and let the imprisoned copper free. From that time I eschewed money-boxes. I have met with many hard knocks in life, but nothing has ever given me more agony, nothing ever appeared to me under an aspect so frightfully serious, as the entombment of that cent in the tin-box.

PARROT TALK.

Words learned by rote a parrot may rehearse,

But talking is not always to converse;

Not more distinct from harmony divine

The constant creaking of a country sign.-CowPER.

UTTERANCES FROM AN OVER-SOUL.

BY A RETIRED PHILOSOPHER.

THERE'S Something pressing on me here
Which lacks, but yet demands expression:

Come, lay to mine thy spirit's ear,

And list thy soul to my confession.

Fair Aphrodite's birth and mine

Were like in kind, though not in story:
She freshly rose from Ocean's brine,
And I from Fancy's sea of glory!

Its radiant, golden, glancing waves,

To see me rise in splendor parted; And flashing from its gleaming caves, Quick to the clouds I deftly darted.

To transcendental heights I soared,
And revelled in extatic vision,
Careless of fools that 'neath me roared,
And piled on high their low derision.

Virgin from Thought, my stainless soul
Is pure of Reason's rough embraces;
And speeding to its Orphic goal,

Through milky ways my life-star races.

My mind has borne no thought and wit,
No impish progeny of Reason,

On Wisdom's mangled corse to sit,

And 'gainst high heaven contrive high treason.

But diving to the depths of things,
And truth in intuition gleaning,

I've knowledge sought at Mystery's springs,
And veiled in mist my mystic meaning.

My seer-words are no chaff and dust
In Logic's grist-mill ground and battered;
My thought-garb, free of antique rust,
Is not age-worn, and soiled and tattered.

Forebodings, memories, mysteries, all

Which stir and mock and shame me ever, Turning my heart's dew into gall,

Clogging with doubt each high endeavor

To these, my hoarded mental riches,
I leave the world administrators;

And, placed in one of Fame's high niches,
I'll herd no more with small" potators."

Now list to me, all spreading ears,

That unto truth like sun-flowers open! And words I'll speak to still your fears, And keep your necks from dangers ropen!

Life is short and bills are long,

Brains are soft and skulls are hard,

Music swells in dinner gong,

Bailiff dogs the doggerel bard.

The world is like an ancient door,
On its hinges it is creaking;

Dim monitions glide before

My tranced soul while it is speaking,

Sense-partitions hem us in,

Fooled we are by Space and Time,

And the syren song of sin

We mistake for sphery chime.

When the joys of youth depart,
When Hope's sun is waxing dim,
Through the long aisles of the Heart,
Hear the Spirit's mournful hymn!

Trust not Beauty's crimson daughters,
Teach thine eye to know control;
Like the rush of mighty waters
Dashes evil through the soul!

Launch thy bark on Thought's wide ocean, Trim its sails in Glory's breeze;

Follow, with majestic motion,

Galleons deep which know the seas.

Hear the swelling notes of song

In the concert of the spheres,

Which through space are borne along
On the wings of great Ideas.

Gaze upon the planet Mars—

Drunk with nectar, see it driven !

Reeling Bacchus of the stars,

Lurid, blood-shot eye of heaven!

See and hear the Comet's tail,
O'er the sky observe it flare!
Listen to the eternal wail

Of the sinners burning there!

From the skies now topple down,
Note the sin beneath the sky;
Tact and talent take the town,
Genius groans in garrets high.

Folly fences all the land,

Faith in quacks remains unshaken, Patriots' words are writ in sand,

Puns and pills are ever taken.