loves to do rash and extravagant things. She must be forever new, or she becomes insipid. If to-day she have been courteous, she will be rude to-morrow; if to-day thinks her over-refined, to-morrow will wonder at seeing her relapsed into a semisavage state. A few years ago, certain elaborate and amorphous structures might be seen moving about the streets, in the whole of which the only symptom of animated nature to be discerned was in the movable feet and ankles which conveyed them along. Now, even that sign of vitality has vanished; the amorphous structures move about as usual, but their motive principle is as mysterious as that of Maëlzel's chess-player. My own theory is, that a dwarf is concealed somewhere within. They may be engines employed for economical purposes by the civic authorities, as their use has I been conjectured by an ingenious foreigner, who observed our manners attentively, to be the collection of those particles of mud and dust which are fine enough to elude the birchen brooms of the police, whose duty it is to cleanse the streets. There is the more plausibility in this theory, as they are actually provided with a cloth train or skirt of various colors, which seems very well adapted to this end. A city poet, remarkable for the boldness of his metaphorical imagery, has given them the name of "women," though from so nice an analogy as hitherto to have eluded my keenest researches.

Is to the soul, that puts it into act,
And prints it full of admirable forms,
Without which 't were an empty, idle flame;
Her eminent judgment to dispose these parts
Sits on her brow and holds a silver sceptre,
Wherewith she keeps time to the several musics
Placed in the sacred concert of her beauties:
Love's complete armory is managed in her
To stir affection, and the discipline

To check and to affright it from attempting
Any attaint might disproportion her,
And make her graces less than circular:
Yet her even carriage is as far from coyness,
As from immodesty; in play, in dancing,
In suffering courtship, in requiting kindness,
In use of places, hours, and companies,
Free as the sun, and nothing more corrupted;
As circumspect as Cynthia in her vows,
As constant as the centre to observe them;
Ruthful and bounteous, never fierce nor dull,
In all her courses ever at the full."

Monsieur D'Olive.

You are

I know what your thoughts are now. thinking that there is but one to whom these silverflowing lines may be applied. You think that it is like "the mantle made amiss" of the old romance, which made itself too short for one and too long for another, and yet fitted itself to the shape of the true maiden like a bridal garment.

JOHN.

Nay, you have shot wide. There can be but one in whom each of us can trace the likeness of

this rare portrait; yet it would be doubting the good providence of God, to draw back our heads. into the dull tortoise-shell of our selfish unbelief, and refuse to think that there are many such. It is only in love that the soul finds weather as summer-like as that of the clime whence it has been transplanted, and can put forth its blossoms and ripen its fruit without fear of nipping frosts. Never was falser doctrine preached than that love's chief delight and satisfaction lies in the pursuit of its object, which won, the charm is already fluttering its wings to seek some fairer height. This is true only when love has been but one of the thousand vizards of selfishness, when we have loved ourselves in the beautiful spirit we have knelt to; that is, when we have merely loved the delight we felt in loving. Then it is that the cup we so thirsted after tastes bitter or insipid, and we fling it down undrunk. Did we empty it, we should find that it was the poor, muddy dregs of self at the bottom, which made our gorge rise. If it be God whom we love in loving our elected one, then shall the bright halo of her spirit expand itself over all existence, till every human face we look upon shall share in its transfiguration, and the old forgotten traces of brotherhood be lit up by it; and our love, instead of pining discomforted, shall be lured upward and upward by low, angelical voices, which recede before it forever, as it mounts from brightening summit to summit on the delectable mountains of aspiration and resolve and deed.

PHILIP.

You are in the mood now to listen to some favorite passages of mine in one of Taylor's Sermons, in which is a sweet picture of the benign influence of piety in a woman. The extract from Chapman which I last read always brings these into my mind. Let us open the grim-looking old folio once more; there is as much true poetry between its shabby covers as may be found anywhere out of Shakspeare,

"I have seen a female religion that wholly dwelt upon the face and tongue; that, like a wanton and undressed tree, spends all its juice in suckers and irregular branches, in leaves and gum, and, after all such goodly outsides, you shall never eat an apple, nor be delighted with the beauties nor the perfumes of a hopeful blossom. But the religion of this excellent lady was of another constitution. It took root downward in humility, and brought forth fruit upward in the substantial graces of a Christian; in charity and justice; in chastity and modesty; in fair friendships and sweetness of society. She had not very much of the forms and outsides of godliness, but she was hugely careful for the power of it, for the moral, essential and useful parts, such which would make her be, not seem to be, religious. . . . In all her religion, and in all her actions of relation toward God, she had a strange evenness and untroubled passage, sliding toward her ocean of God and of infinity with a certain and silent motion. So have I seen a a river, deep and smooth, passing with a still foot and a sober face, and paying to the fiscus, the great exchequer, of the sea, the prince of all the watery bodies, a tribute large and full; and hard by it a little brook, skipping and making a noise upon its unequal and neighbour bottom, and, after all its talking and bragged motion, it paid to its common audit no more than the revenues of a little cloud or a contemptible vessel. So have I

olitionism. Perhaps we may ere long be taught to call our homes papa-land and mamma-country, leaving the uncouth names of father and mother to such as are ignorant or gross enough to be natural. Let us forget that we ever so far yielded to the demoralizing tendency of our baser natures as to have been suckled at our mother's breasts, (if we can do so while the present fashion of feminine full-dress retains its sway,) and do penance in white kid gloves and French boots for the damnable heresy of our childhood, when we entertained a theory, unfounded as the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, that straightforward truth was respectable, and that women had other developments besides head and arms, our uninspired eyesight to the contrary notwithstanding!

JOHN.

You are getting very merry and very parenthetical at the same time. Let the original topic of our conversation now edge itself in, by way of parenthesis, and let me have a chance of judging for myself of the dignity of Chapman's ideas of woman.

PHILIP.

I heartily thank you for disentangling me so adroitly. Hear Chapman ;

"Noble she is by birth made good by virtue ;
Exceeding fair; and her behaviour to it
Is like a singular musician

To a sweet instrument, or else as doctrine