State House; where I saw "As You Like It" better played than at any theatre in London. To be sure, all the actors in America are English, with very few exceptions; but all ours come here first or last; either to star it, or to change their fortunes. The Park Theatre, the Bowery, Niblo's, and Barnum's Museum, opposite the Astor, together with various halls and concert-rooms, form the great points of the evenings' amusements. They talk of building an immense opera-house.

I have alluded to the larger scale of their houses and shops compared with ours; but some of the stores and buildings are gigantic-seven and eight stories high, with from sixty to a hundred windows on a side. Stewart's marble store on the Broadway is most magnificent; it is the Howell and James's of New York, but is infinitely finer and larger, the whole exterior of marble. Indeed, everywhere, as to marble and granite facings, pillars, pilasters, cornices, jambs, sills, door-posts, steps, there is an amazing richness in all the principal streets, and the brickwork of their houses of an inimitable neatness and strength, far beyond our buildings of late years in London. We have nothing to compare to it, except some of our old houses, such as Lord in the corner of Hanoversquare, and a few others we point to now as curiosities in brickwork.

THE EVE OF ALL-SOULS.

BY MRS. ACTON TINDAL.

V.

THE LEGEND OF THE VIA DELLA MORTE.

I WENT forth in the livid light,
Beneath the spectre-peopled night;
I stood, a breathing soul alone,
Beside the cross of old grey stone,
Time-stained by lichens overgrown.
Each phantom turned its passing face
To look upon the sign of grace;
And some came forth and stood aside,
To tell me how they lived and died.
One stayed behind, exceeding fair,
The queen of shadowy beauty there.
I saw the moonbeam glance and shine
Through the light hand she laid in mine;
Love's accents on the graveyard broke,
In soft Italian tongue she spoke:
"Twice sang for me the funeral choir-
Two deaths, two graves, I knew;
The mourners watched me twice expire,
The shroud twice round me drew.

I slowly sank in fainting sleep-
The pulses paused, the breath

Stole from me-long that trance and deep
Sleep wore the face of death.

They culled for me the whitest flowers,
'Mid summer leaves that bloom;
Through Florence, in the evening hours,
They bore me to my tomb.

I woke, beneath a chequered beam
Of moonlight cold and dim;
The silence of my waking dream
Was haunted by a hymn.

Faint straying notes of solemn sound,
Prayers chanted far

away;

Awhile they came, and hovered round,
As breathing faint I lay.

On my damp brow, and braided hair,
White lilies, stained and dead,
Lay flaccid, lank, no longer fair,
A chill weight on my head.
I dare not break the solemn lull,
That quiet's deathly reign;
My voice seemed muffled, strangely dull,
It came back on my brain.
An icy dew burst o'er my face,

The dread truth on me shone;
Within that cavern burial-place
I lived-I lived-alone.

Hope died before that studded door,
Those strong bolts' iron teeth;
The low-groined roof, the rocky floor,
That dankly lay beneath.
The skeletons were ranged along
Against the cavern side,
Like sentinels of death-among
The bones of those who died.
The gleamy track of many a snail
Was on the weltering wall,
I heard the reptile's rustling trail,
The rats raced down the hall.

I burst, for horror gave me strength,
From off that ghastly bed;

I tottered in my shroud's white length,
I raised my dizzy head;

I felt the night-wind rushing through
My prison's iron bars,

Up, up to them my face I drew,

And blessed the distant stars.

I prayed, I strove with frantic might,
The stanchion's base lay bare;

My God! thy mercy heard that night
Mine agony of prayer!

Jan.-VOL. XCVII. NO. CCCLXXXV.

H

Wild exaltation filled each thought,
Before those gates I past,

Where every wonder Jesu wrought
In deathless bronze is cast.
The moonlit street I fluttered through,
In floating grave-clothes clad,
As near my beauteous home I drew,
I trembled, strangely sad!

I kissed each step, I wept, and cried,
I smote the well-barred gate,
'My lord, again a white-robed bride
Thy loving will I wait.'

My husband made the sign of

Thy masses shall be said;

grace

Back, blest soul! to the burial-place,
Back,' cried he, to the dead."
And strongly barred the gate he kept,
I prayed and wept in vain,
Then to my father's house I crept,
My childhood's home again.
'Thou evil thing,' my father cried,

'I felt the life retreat,

From the dear heart of her who died
I told each faltering beat;
Avaunt! her mother closed her eye
And smoothed each trace of pain;
And not till time itself shall die,
May she come back again.'
One, one I'd loved in joyous hours,

The April days of life;

I'd hoped amid my birds and flowers,

I'd prayed to be his wife.

Since then in crowds we'd often met,

His

In glare of festal light,

gaze of silent, stern regret
Fell on me like a blight.

Oh, often through the kindling eye
His heart had called to mine,
I trembled lest too soft reply
Through all my face should shine.
A few brief faltering words we said,
With crimsoning cheek and pale,
And each the other's secret read,

And heard the unuttered wail.
The ground was white with fallen flowers
Beneath the orange-tree;

He wandered in the garden bowers,
He watched to weep for me.

Through the dark glittering leaves I past,

Through roses bowed with bloom,

Myself before his feet I cast

In garments of the tomb.

In broken sobs his name I called;
By happy days gone by,

I prayed him not to shrink appalled,
Besought him not to fly;

But for the old deep faith in him
Yet living in my breast,

My soul, in stupor vague and dim,
Had ebbed away to rest.
'Art thou a phantom?' then he cried,
Oh! haunt my path for aye!

Spirit or woman, from my side
Oh! ne'er depart, I pray!
Be what thou mayst, beloved one,
This heart, this breast is thine,
And I will yield thee back to none—
Living or dead thou'rt mine!'
He bore me to his mother's bed,
I lay while death and life

For me, around their boundary dread,
Strove in delirious strife.

His spirit held mine fluttering low
Upon the fatal brink;

I watched him passing to and fro,
Too weak to speak or think;
Oh, cure not wrought by gums or balm
That flow where tropics shine,

Not borrowed from the dreamy calm
Of drug or anodyne ;

It came upon those summer hours,
When through each languid vein,
And thrilling nerve, the flagging powers
Of life flowed back again;

When his voice pleading in mine ear
Reclaimed me from the dead,
His love made life's return so dear,
And death, ah! doubly dread.
The people rose, the nobles cried-
E'en stern law set me free,

They cast sweet blossoms o'er the bride,
They blessed my love and me-
For death had loosed the marriage chain,
And I need feign no more,

And I might live and love again
Him loved so long before."

READER, what is religion? It would be a curious pastime, not perhaps unmixed with matter for grave reflection, to hear the definition of the word religion given by half a score of men of the world, chosen at random. Not two would agree. A well-known talented woman was recently accused by an acquaintance of possessing no religion. "No religion!" she cried, indignantly; "I go to church every Sunday morning." And to "go to church" on a Sunday morning makes up the sum total of the ideas of religion possessed by too many of us in this world. But there is another class who have too much religion-of a certain sort, who spend all their Sundays inside a sacred edifice, and edify themselves four or five times in the week at prayer-meetings besides : and yet they know nothing of true religion, save what lies in its name. They are the Pharisees of this world-let us hope the others are the Publicans.

Of this Pharisee-class were Mr. and Mrs. Livingstone, and a most religious couple they were; all the world said so. He a man of wonderful attainments (especially in his own conceit), as an instructor of youth ought to be; most regular in his attendance at divine worship on the seventh day, and a great holder-forth at prayer-meetings; a liberal contributor to public charities, when he made sure the donors' names would be published forth, and as repelling and austere in manner as could be desired. She was a wife meet for such a man. Her faith was different from his, but she was quite as eager in fulfilling all its outward ceremonies and forms: she was a careful housewife, and a strict, unforgiving mistress. Yet, if theirs was true religion, the religion taught by our Saviour, it somehow did not, to the general eye, wear so attractive an aspect as it ought; certainly it was not such that we would be inclined to go to the stake for, and become a martyr. He was too good for this world; he verily believed so, or at least that all the rest of its inhabitants were hundreds of degrees below him in sanctity. Both he and his wife were sensitively alive to the faults of others, keen in their reproaches, especially where the culprits were in an inferior class of life, and sure to blazon them forth to the world. Yet a kind word seldom dropped from their lips, nor was a shilling ever bestowed in private charity; with them every sinner deserved punishment, and none forgiveness. A most "respectable" man was Mr. Livingstone, cited far and near as a pattern to all. He was a churchwarden, a poor-law guardian, a tract-distribution-society treasurer, an able stirrer-up of the pockets of his native town in aid of the "Gospel in Foreign Parts," with various other honorary offices; and in his staid, stern wife, owning to some thirty years, who would have recognised the once lovely, once gay and careless Annie Lee?

Yet so it was. And it was a nine days' wonder to all his friends and admirers when the little tolerant Mr. Livingstone, the orthodox churchman, chose a Catholic lady for his second wife, and brought her home and installed her as the mother of his two boys. Little was known of