Glory on glory! The great sky
Trembles with splendour :-and a flow
Of hallowed radiance from on high,
Encircles all below.

O God, O God! the sin forgive

Of being callous to the bliss,

Of feeling that we breathe and live
In such a world as this!

W.

CARNATION AND INSECTS.

THE fragrance of a carnation led me to enjoy it frequently and near. While inhaling the powerful sweet, I heard an extremely soft, but agreeable murmuring sound. It was easy to know that some animal, within the covert, must be the musician, and that the little noise must come from some little body suited to produce it. I am furnished with apparatuses of a thousand kinds for close observation. I instantly distended the lower part of the flower, and, placing it in a full light, could discover troops of little insects frisking and capering with wild jollity among the narrow pedestals that supported its leaves, and the little threads that occupied its centre. I was not cruel enough to pull out any one of them; but adapting a microscope to take in, at one view, the whole base of the flower, 1 gave myself an opportunity of contemplating what they were about, and this for many days together, without giving them the least disturbance.

Under the microscope, the base of the flower extended itself to a vast plain; the slender stems of the leaves became trunks of so many stately cedars; the threads in the middle seemed columns of massy structure, supporting at the top their several ornaments; and the narrow spaces between were enlarged into walks, parterres, and terraces.

On the polished bottom of these, brighter than Parian marble, walked in pairs, alone, or in larger companies, the winged inhabitants: these from little dusky flies, for such only the naked eye would have shown them, were raised to glorious glittering animals, stained with living purple, and with a glossy gold that would have made all the labours of the loom contemptible in the comparison. I could, at leisure, as they walked together, admire their elegant

limbs, their velvet shoulders, and their silken wings; their backs vying with the empyrean in its hue; and their eyes each formed of a thousand others, out-glittering the little planes on a brilliant. I could observe them here singling out their favourite females, courting them with the music of their buzzing wings, with little songs formed for their little organs, leading them from walk to walk among the perfumed shades, and pointing out to their taste the drop of liquid nectar just bursting from some vein within the living trunk: here were the perfumed groves, the more than myrtle shades of the poet's fancy, realized; here the happy lovers spent their days in joyful dalliance;-in the triumph of their little hearts, skipped after one another from stem to stem among the painted trees; or winged their short flight to the close shadow of some broader leaf, to revel undisturbed in the heights of all felicity.

Nature, the God of nature, has proportioned the period of existence of every creature to the means of its support. Duration, perhaps, is as much a comparative quality as magnitude; and these atoms of being, as they appear to us, may have organs that lengthen minutes, to their perception, into years. In a flower destined to remain but a few days, length of life, according to our ideas, could not be given to its inhabitants; but it may be according to theirs. I saw, in the course of observation of this new world, several succeeding generations of the creatures it was peopled with; they passed, under my eye, through the several successive states of the egg and the reptile form in a few hours. After these, they burst forth at an instant into full growth and perfection in their wingform. In this they enjoyed their span of being, as much as we do years-feasted, sported, revelled in delights; fed on the living fragrance that poured itself out at a thousand openings at once before them; enjoyed their loves, laid the foundation for their succeeding progeny, and, after a life thus happily filled up, sunk in an easy dissolution. With what joy in their pleasures did I attend the first and the succeeding broods through the full period of their joyful lives! With what enthusiastic transport did I address to each of these yet happy creatures Anacreon's gratulation to the Cicada:

Blissful insect! what can be,

In happiness, compared to thee?
Fed with nourishment divine,
The dewy morning's sweetest wine.
Nature waits upon thee still,
And thy fragrant cup does fill.
All the fields that thou dost see,
All the plants belong to thee:

All that summer hours produce,
Fertile made with ripening juice.
Man for thee does sow and plough,
Farmer he, and landlord thou.
Thee the hinds with gladness hear,
Prophet of the ripen'd year!
To thee alone, of all the earth,
Life is no longer than thy mirth.
Happy creature! happy thou

Dost neither age, nor winter know;

But when thou'st drank, and danced, and sung
Thy fill, the flowery leaves among,

Sated with the glorious feast,

Thou retir'st to endless rest.

While the pure contemplative mind thus almost envies what the rude observer would treat unfeelingly, naturally shrinks into itself on the thought that there may be, in the immense chain of beings, many, though as invisible to us as we to the inhabitants of this little flower-whose organs are not made for comprehending objects larger than a mite, or more distant than a straw's breadth-to whom we may appear as much below regard as these

to us.

With what derision should we treat those little reasoners, could we hear them arguing for the unlimited duration of the carnation, destined for the extent of their knowledge, as well as their action! And yet among ourselves, there are reasoners who argue, on no better foundation, that the earth which we inhabit is eternal. SIR JOHN HILL.

THE CONVICT SHIP.

MORN on the waters !-and, purple and bright,
Bursts on the billows the flushing of light;

O'er the glad waves, like a child of the sun,

See the tall vessel goes gallantly on;

Full to the breeze she unbosoms her sail,

And her pennon streams onward, like hope, in the gale;
The winds come around her, in murmur and song,
And the surges rejoice, as they bear her along.

See! she looks up to the golden-edged clouds,
And the sailor sings gaily aloft in the shrouds :
Onward she glides, amid ripple and spray,
Over the waters,-away, and away!
Bright as the visions of youth, ere they part,
Passing away, like a dream of the heart!
Who, as the beautiful pageant sweeps by,
Music around her, and sunshine on high-

Pauses to think, amid glitter and glow,
Oh! there be hearts that are breaking below!
Night on the waves!-and the moon is on high,
Hung, like a gem, on the brow of the sky,
Treading its depths in the power of her might,
And turning the clouds, as they pass her, to light!
Look to the waters !-asleep on their breast,
Seems not the ship like an island of rest?
Bright and alone on the shadowy main,

Like a heart-cherished home on some desolate plain!
Who-as she smiles in the silvery light,

Spreading her wings on the bosom of night,
Alone on the deep, as the moon in the sky,
A phantom of beauty-could deem with a sigh,
That so lovely a thing is the mansion of sin,
And souls that are smitten lie bursting within ?
Who-as he watches her silently gliding-
Remembers that wave after wave is dividing
Bosoms that sorrow and guilt could not sever,
Hearts which are parted and broken for ever?
Or deems that he watches, afloat on the wave,
The death-bed of hope, or the young spirit's grave?

"Tis thus with our life: while it passes along,
Like a vessel at sea, amid sunshine and song!
Gaily we glide, in the gaze of the world,

With streamers afloat, and with canvass unfurled;
All gladness and glory to wandering eyes,

Yet chartered by sorrow, and freighted with sighs :

Fading and false is the aspect it wears,

As the smiles we put on, just to cover our tears;

And the withering thoughts which the world cannot know,
Like heart-broken exiles lie burning below;

Whilst the vessel drives on to that desolate shore,

Where the dreams of our childhood are vanished and o'er!

THE JEW OF HAMAH.*

ONCE upon a time there lived in Hamah a certain Turk called Mustapha, who, having accumulated some wealth by carrying on a trade in goats' hair, determined to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. His family consisted of his wife and two slaves; and as the lady insisted on not being left behind, the good man resolved to sell off his stock of goats' hair, to take all his household with him, and to shut up his house till his return. The only difficulty that presented itself was what to do with his money. He did not like to run the risk of being robbed of it in his journey through the desert, he did not like to leave it in an empty house, and there were not any of his friends to whom he wished to trust the secret of his wealth. After much deliberation he placed it in separate parcels at the bottom of five large earthern jars, which he then filled up with butter, and on his departure sent them to the house of one of his neighbours, a Jew named Mousa, to keep till his return, telling him that it was a stock which he had laid in for winter consumption. The Jew, however, from the weight of the jars and other circumstances, suspected that they contained something more valuable; and as soon as Mustapha was fairly on his way to Damascus to join the caravan, he ventured to open them; when, finding his expectations realized, he took out the gold and filled them up again with butter so carefully, that nobody could tell that they had been disturbed. The poor Turk, on his return from the pilgrimage, soon found out the trick that his neighbour had practised upon him; but as the jars were exactly in the same apparent state as when he left them, and as there was no evidence as to their contents, it was plain that no legal process could give him any redress. He therefore set about to devise some other way of punishing the Jew, and of recovering if possible his property; and in the meantime he did not communicate his loss to any person but his wife, and enjoined on her the strictest secrecy. After long consideration, a plan suggested itself. In one of his visits to the neighbouring town of Homs, where he was in the habit of going to sell his goats' hair to the manufacturers of the mashlakhs, for which that place is famous, he fell in with a troop of gypsies, who had with them an ape of extraordinary sagacity. He prevailed on them to sell him this animal; and conveying it privately to his house at Hamah, shut it up in a room to which no one but

From "Narrative of a Tour through some parts of the Turkish Empire, by John Fuller, Esq."