APPREHENSION. BY H. F. GOULD. "Oh! sister, he is so swift and tall, "I said, little prattler, the world was a race, That he who was deaf to fear, And did not look out for a rein or a guide, "Oh! sister! sister! I fear to try. It creeps at my touch-and he winks his eye- Come! dear mother, tell us some more ORIGINAL. LINES ON A CLOCK. We have hail'd thee time's tell-tale, We have thought thy pace too lagging, In truth thou art a despot, And rul'st with tyrant sway; Behold, before thy ruling voice, How many a smile has vanish'd And yet, again how welcome, From the same source should spring, 'Tis so from childhood's morning, They know there comes a sweet release At setting of the sun. The fond impatient lover, His day of trial past, He gladly hails the evening shades Blithe pleasure, with her many bells Less frequently were rung. C. H. W. 98 THE MUTABILITY OF HUMAN GRANDEUR. Written for the Casket. The Mutability of Human Grandeur. Cæsar was ambitious and Cæsar was victorious. But after having conquered the world, and maimed and murdered millions of mankind, he fell beReflections occasioned by the death of the young neath the dagger of his adopted son, a victim to NAPOLEON. Unnunaber'd suppliants crowd preferment's gate, Athirst for wealth, and burning to be great; Delusive fortune hears the incessant call, They mount, they shine, evaporate, and fall. How perishable is human fame! How transitory is human grandeur. Like a star on the verge of the horizon, they dazzle in the gaze of the world for a moment, and then sink forever in the abyss of darkness. No conqueror ever yet shook the world with his triumphs, or beheld captive nations kneeling at his feet, that was not doomed to go down and be lost in the vortex of revolutions. The renowned Æneas, the terror of the sons of Grecian heroism, he who bore upon his back the old Anchises from the flaming towers of Troy, became a wanderer in the world, an exile from the land he loved; and at last proved recreant to the love and lavish kindness of the brilliant and beautiful Dido. The name of Æneas lives only in the song of Virgil. The mad Macedonian snatched the glittering spear from the hand of his victorious father, and astonished mankind with the brilliance of his unbounded achievments. Standing on the pinnacle of the pyramids of Egypt, he saw the world in chains, prostrate at his feet, and millions trembling at the nod of one ambitious man. Seventy cities, as if by magic, sprang into existence. But where is Alexander, and where those cities that arose at his bidding? Alas! he has long since fallen the victim of debauchery and midnight revel, and the ruined towers of the last city are tottering to their fall, and are still seen on the banks of the eternal Nile. Alexandria, once the seat of commerce and science, of opulence and the arts, has now grown gray with years: no vestige of her once gigantic library exists, and the noiseless tooth of time is at work in the crumbling walls of her temples, which the proud architect vainly imagined would stand as an eternal monument of his fame. The desolating hand of time has destroyed every trace of his temple and his tomb, and left nothing but the imperishable page of history to record the wrecks of his renown and the ruin of his race. The barbarous Turk now surveys from his Seraglio and the Seven Towers, the vast empire, once swayed by the mighty house of Macedonia, and revels in the gardens where the conqueror of the world once sought his voluptuous repose. His fate has been no happier than that of his horse, Bucephalus, both have triumphed in their pride, and both have gone down to the dust, leaving nothing for the world to wonder at but their naked names, and nothing for the moralists of posterity but to reflect on the enormity of their crimes and their conquests. The next page in the progress of history, presents two of the bravest and most brilliant heroes that ever waded through blood to conquest, or loaded the limbs of liberty with galling chains. his ambition, in the very scene of his greatest triumph; and the garland that graced his brow, the very next moment adorned his tomb. The regal robes that decked his person, and the royal gewgaws that glittered on his breast, which were, a moment before, the guarantees of his glory, became, at the base of Pompey's statue, the trophies of the grave. Hannibal, too, the glory of Carthage and the terror of Rome; the warrior and statesman: he who crossed the sublime solitudes of the Alps, never before attempted by man, became an exile, and was betrayed by a heartless prince, in whose cause his sword had been victoriously wielded. The rival of Scipio, like him, he fell by his own hand rather than fall into the hands of the Romans, who had long trembled at his name. Thus a cup of poison put a period to the existence of a man whom the world mourned and admired, and whom Rome at once dreaded and despised. Oh fame what a phantom thou art! Never was the rise and ruin of any individual so conspicuous as of Napoleon Bonaparte. Flung into the very vortex of a revolution, he rose with a rapidity unparalleled; and while the world looked on with astonishment, he dashed the crown from the head of the Bourbon, and calmly seated himself on the throne of France. From a subaltern to a sovereign, and from a cockade to a crown, with him, was but a step and almost the work of a moment. The scenes of his mighty career changed with the rapidity of those in a Camera Obscura, and were not more brilliant than they were transient. He stretched out his mighty arm over Egypt, and the Ætheop and the Arab became as harmless as the embalmed bodies of three thousand years. The land of oriental tombs and triumphs became the trophy of his victorious march, and with Italy, the very Eden of the arts was inscribed on the long list of his splendid achievments. He made Paris splendid with the spoils of other cities and nations, and filled her galleries with the triumphs of the art of a Raphael, a el, a Michael Angelo, and other celebrated sculptors and painters. She became gorgeous with the wrecks and relics of Italian grandeur, and in the midst of all that little world of glory, sat enthroned the mighty Despot of Europe. From the pinnacle of his glory he beheld once powerful kings as his subjects, and deserted thrones, which must crumble at his nod, or pass into the possession of those on whom his own transcendent genius had reflected greatness.Even the unbounded power of the Pope, acknowledged in every civilized land, passed away and vanished in the vortex of that revolution he had commenced; and the world looked on astonished, while a native of Corsica proclaimed himself the Emperor of Italy, and took possession of the city of the Cæsars. His mighty march was onward, but the tide of fortune once changed; his descent was as rapid as his elevation. But whether seated on the throne of the ancient Czars, amid the flaming ruins of Moscow, or traversing the burning sands of Numidia; whether battling at Austerliz, or heading the merry dance in the saloons of Paris, he was still the same fearless and ambitious conqueror; still the same grand and gloomy genius. THE MUTABILITY OF HUMAN GRANDEUR. Like Henry the Eighth of England, he repudiated one wife to make room for another; but unlike the British tyrant, he made the pope a pander and pimp to his licentious desires and sacrilegious inclinations. The same pontiff who thus became a pander to his passion, and whom, to cap the climax, he had crowned, soon found himself imprisoned by that power which he himself had formerly conferred. Not more transient was the career of ambition which Napoleon pursued, than the benefits which he conferred upon Europe. Europe. That he conferred benefits there is no doubt, for the pages of his own history are pregnant with ample proof. Through the fear of his irresistible power the Holy Alliance was humbled, and the autocrat of the north became more lenient to the nations over whom he had tyrannized. The modern feudal system which had sprung from the gothic ruins of the dark ages, disappeared before the light of his more genial principles, and the nations of Europe, so long the tools of tyrants, awoke to a sense of the rights and dignity of mankind. He spoke, and liberty walked forth in the gardens of Spain and Portugal, decked and adorned with the garlands of gratitude. He spoke, and superstition was entombed in the terrific dungeons of the Inquisition, which had long been sacred to tyranny and torture, to silence and despair. Behold unto him a son is born! But scarcely had that son been crowned in his cradle, in the name of his fortunate father, ere the scene changes, and the star of Napoleon's glory is gone down in blood on the fatal field of Waterloo. In that hour the crown which he had crushed upon the head of another crumbled on his own, and the throne of his vast vassel empire passed away like the phantom of a noon-day dream. With him fell the host of soldiers and subalterns whom he had made sovereigns in the day of his glorious triumphs; and with the restoration of the monarchs whom Napoleon had dethroned, disappeared all the benefits which he had conferred on Europe. Scarcely had three years passed away ere every trace of Napoleon's grandeur had vanished with the good he had effected, and left the legitimate monarchs to tyrannize again, and trample on the necks of nations which he had led in triumph to liberty. Fallen and deserted by fortune, we behold the great Napoleon, the terror of England and the scourge of Europe, wandering an exile in the country he had conquered, and an outcast from the very people he had emancipated. Such is popular favour-such the applause of the multitude. As if conscious that the task was accomplished for which heaven designed him, he gave himself up in a moment of despair, to the very power which had so long looked with terror upon his triumphs, and so long dreaded the vengeance 99 can withstand ambition in despair? The great Napoleon's mind sunk under his accumulated miseries and misfortunes; for he not only saw himself fallen but the prospects of his son, the darling hope and inheritor of his grandeur and glory blasted in the bud; and he went down to the grave a spirit-broken man. Posterity will worship his genius and wonder at the brilliance of his career. He sleeps in a barren rock-a common tomb alone tells where the mighty hero reposes-no gorgeous monument records the rise of his renown or the wrecks of his ruin. How mournful, how melancholy was the fate of the young Napoleon! Born with the star of empire on his breast, and crowned in the cradle the future emperor of Italy and France, he lived to see his mighty father fall from the pinnacle of his power, and with him all the splendid prospects that fortune had promised to Limself. He lived to find himself transported to an unknown land, where a dungeon must stay the stirring of ambition, and jealousy lord it over the first aspiration of genius. Ay, he lived to feel that he was a prisoner in the power of Austria, and that a single word or wish which should indicate the rising spirit of the fallen Napoleon, would subject him to a surveillance at once the most rigorous and unrelenting. Thus situated, the young Napoleon passed his days in inglorious ease, and approached the verge of manhood with a mind trammeled by the manacles of the most odious of all despotism, the tyranny of mind. Whether the young Napoleon possessed the genius of his fallen father I know not. But be it so or not, his closing life was as melancholy as his birth was brilliant. What we have never possessed we mourn not for, but that from which we have fallen is remembered with a lasting regret, and calls forth the sympathy of mankind. Philip had his son Alexander-Cæsar his adopted son Brutus, and Napoleon his son Napoleon the Second: but alas! how fallen. After passing a life of constant restraint, he has gone down to the grave ere manhood had marked his brow, or ambition had roused his soul to a scase of the sublime height from which he had fallen. dicated, Yet not more various were the fortunes of the young Napoleon than the vicissitudes to which France has been subjected. Scarcely had Napoleon fallen ere Louis the Eighteenth brought back to the throne all the vices which had been eradicated, and no sooner had the grave closed over him, than the Count d'Artois, Charles the Tenth, seized the sceptre and attempted to tyrannize over the very people who had so recently learned the rudiments of liberty in the school of the great Napoleon. He imagined that the same chains were still rattling on their arms that his feudal ancestors had rivetted, and in attempting to add another he lost his crown. His minions, the tools of his tyranny, shared perhaps a worse fate; for cut off from the world and divorced from their wives, they now lie immured in a dungeon, of his arm. Thrown upon a bleak and barren the iron doors of which they can never pass but island, in the lone solitude of the ocean, England as a corse. After three days, in which the sword doomed him to dwell, for whose grand and mighty mind a world was not too wide. England thus triumphed over the downfall of a man whose single voice, in the day of his glory, had struck terror to tyrants, and made millions tremble. Who of liberty was drawn, and the streets of Paris were stained with the blood of her bravest and best citizens and soldiers, the flag of peace streamed proudly from every pinnacle, and the bleeding flag of freedom waved triumphantly on 610400 A 100 THE MUTABILITY OF HUMAN GRANDEUR-THE CUP. the walls of the capitol. They triumphed over the pretended downfall of the Bourbon dynasty, and immediately led to the throne one of the same line. The timidity and absence of decision which characterize Louis Philip, preclude the possibility that he can long wear the crown or sway the sceptre of gay and gallant France; a country, the people of which are proverbially brave and ambitious. A people no less celebrated in the arts than in arms, and who, led on by the gallant Napoleon, carried conquest to the gates of Italy and Egypt, and saw more than half of the noblest nations of Europe vanquished by their valour. When I remember that I was born in this republic, I rejoice. Let the miseries of the once happy and powerful Poland stimulate our countrymen to union and the love of liberty; for if once that love languishes, and the tyrant sets foot upon our soil, that moment the fabric of our freedom totters to its fall. We have cause to be proud of our prosperity, and it is our duty to hand down to posterity, untarnished, the gloriousς gift which our ancestors assigned us, sealed with their sacred blood. MILFORD BARD. THE CUP. BY EDWARD GAMAGE, ESQ. The little prints that stud the threshold o'er, There is a Cup of BLISS: It mantles bright, and sends its foam aloft, Nor ken the shapes that 'neath its surface swim. With worthless tinsel deck'd. 'The ignoble crowd. And the pale rank grass waves its hated sward, She lifts it to the skies! and onward rush There is a stain upon the character of Louis Philip, which time itself can never obliterate. When the iron hand of the oppressor prostrated the Poles, and bleeding humanity called upon the monarchs of Europe for inercy, Louis Philip heard the appeal without a sigh, and saw Poland fall without a tear. When the French people were roused to madness by the cries of the suffering, and ready to march at a moment's warning, the coldness of Louis Philip and his minister repressed their ardour and paved the way for the downfall of Poland. And what is Poland now? The world weeps over her wretched condition and her ruined fortunes. Not only are her fields red with the blood of her bravest sons, but a cruelty more intolerable than death itself is now resorted to by the inhuman Nicholas, to revenge her patriotism, and it would seem, to exterminate the very nationality of the Poles. I allude, with horror, to the banishment to Siberia of thousands of Polish children, whose crimes consist in the patriotism of their fathers. It is a deed worthy of a demon. What heart but one dead to feeling could behold the agony of maternal love, whilst dragging from her her only son, the hope of her declining years, and not melt into compassion! Even at this moment perhaps the idolized boy has just bid his mother the agonizing adieu, and has joined the throng who are doomed to the deserts of Siberia, sad exiles in the spring of life, destined never again to behold the face of their friends, or the flowery fields of their native country. We are told that two boys, sons of General Roenstein, were ordered by the Emperor Nicholas to be sent off with hundreds of others to Siberia. The mourning mother memorialized the tyrant, and begged him to spare her the younger son. To this she received no consolatory answer. She then implored him in the name of nature, and of God and mercy, to spare her the agonizing calamity of having her last hope torn from her bleeding heart. The tyrant returned a brutal threat as an answer. Finding that her last hope had fled, and that her darling child was doomed to be torn from her bosom by the ruffians who stood round, yet more tender than the tyrant who condemned her children, she kissed her guiltless boy, and then, in the agony of the moment, seized a dagger and plunged it to his young heart. Imagine her feelings when the quivering body of her boy fell bleeding at her feet. Oh, God, it was a scene calculated to touch even the heart of the tyrant himself. And this was a taste of tyranny! Ay, this was for the crime of the father, who had nobly bared his bosom in the field flows: they are sometimes as it were exhausted, then let There is a Cup of TEARS, With oziers bound, and planted on the grave; For still round sorrow's cup, Oh, MEMORY! thy Cup. Thy bruised yet precious cup. lonesome I sing! * * * Well, there's a Cup of DEATH: "And who so artful as to put it by?" And beach our prow on unimagin'd shore! SEASONS OF WIT. - The greatest wits have their ebbs and them neither write nor talk, nor aim at entertaining. Should a man singwhen he has a cold? Should he not wait till he of freedom, and resisted a tyrant whose mercy is THE BANDIT'S TEST-SONG-THE MOTHER. REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS. The Lives and Exploits of Banditti and Robbers in all Parts of the World. By C. Mac Farlane, Esq. MR. MAC FARLANE most truly observes, that "there are few subjects that interest us more ge nerally than the adventures of robbers and ban ditti. In our infancy they awaken and rivet our attention as much as the best fairy tales; and when our happy credulity in all things is wofully abated, and our faith in the supernatural fied, we still retain our taste for the deeds and wild lives of brigands. Neither the fulness of years nor the maturity of experience and worldly wisdom can render us insensible to tales of terror such as fascinated our childhood, nor preserve us from a 'creeping of the flesh' as we read or listen to the narrative containing the daring exploits of some robber-chief, his wonderful 101 and which was well known to his mistress, and told him to run with it to her, and tell her an old friend desired to speak with her at the fountain. The child took the reliquary, and a piece of silver which the robber gave him on his vowing by the village before one hour of the night, and ran the Madonna to say nothing about the matter in hind the old fountain, taking his rifle in his hand, and keeping a sharp look out, lest his mistress affectionate girl, who might have loved him still, should betray him, or not come alone. But the to the village. The robber then retired be in spite of his guilt, who might have hoped to render him succour on some urgent need, or, perhaps, to hear that he was penitent and anxious to return to society, went alone and met him at the fountain, where, as the bells of the village church were tolling the Ave Maria, her lover met her, and stabbed her to the heart! The monster then cut off her head, and ran away with it address, his narrow escapes, and his prolonged to join the brigands, who were obliged to own crimes, seated by our own peaceful hearth." THE BANDIT'S TEST. that after such a deed and such a proof as he produced, he was worthy to be their chief." From the Saturday Evening Post. SONG OF THE CORSAIR. Could I fly where the gems of the mountain are sparkling, The purest of diamonds to place by her side! INDIAN BARD. THE MOTHER.-A SKETCH. BY JOSEPH R. CHANDLER, ESQ. "A young man, who had been several years an outlaw, on the violent death of the chief of the troop he belonged to, aspired to be Capo-bandito in his stead. He had gone through his noviciate with honour, he had shewn both cunning and courage in his calling as brigand, but the supremacy of the band was disputed with him by others, and the state of the times bade the robbers be specially careful as to whom they elected for their leader. He must be the strongest-nerved fellow of the set! The ambitious candidate offered to give any, even the most dreadful proof of his strength of nerve; and a monster among his companions proposed he should go to his native village and murder a young girl to whom he had been formerly attached. 'I will do it,' said the ruffian, who at once departed on his infernal mission. When he reached the village, he dared not present himself, having begun his crimes there by murdering a comrade: he skulked behind an old stone fountain, outside of the village, until near sunset, when the women came forth with their copper vases on their heads to get their supplies of water at the fountain. His mistress came carelessly gossipping with the rest. He could have shot her with his rifle, but he was afraid of pursuit, and wanted besides, time to secure and carry off a bloody trophy. He therefore remained quiet, only hoping that she might loiter behind the rest. She, however, was one of the first to balance her vessel of water on her head, and to take the path to the village, whither all the gossips soon followed her. What was now to be done? He was determined to go through the ordeal and consummate the hellish crime. A child went by the fountain whistling. He laid down his rifle, so as not to alarm the little villager, and presenting himself to him, gave him the reliquary he had worn round his neck for years, ❘ their prismatic beauty; but below and between, Early in one of those beautiful mornings of last May, that called forth from the city so much of its youth, beauty, and even its decrepitude, to inhale and gratify a refined taste, I was riding leisurely along the narrow road that skirts the Schuylkill, about a mile above the princely and hospitable mansion of Mr. Pratt. Solitude and the darkening foliage of the surrounding trees, gave a solemnity to the scene, that even those whom grief and habits of reflection render fond of retirement, so dearly love. Not a breath of air disturbed the leaves of the branches that stretched across the pathway. It was the true silence of nature in her secret places, and the mind undisturbed by outward objects grew busy in the solitude. An opening in the bushes on the left, showed the summit of the hills on the opposite banks of the river, just touched with the yellow tints of the rising sun; and the dew gema upon its luxuriant grass glanced its beams in all |