Lancholy strains of Mimnermus were not more dictated by a poetical fancy, than by the operations of reflection and reason on the prevailing opinions of the time.

Drink and rejoice! what comes to

morrow,

Or what the future can bestow, Of pain or pleasure, joy or sorrow, Men are not wise enough to know.

O bid farewel to care and labour,

Enjoy your life while yet you may, Impart your blessings to your neighbour,

And give your hours to frolic play.

Life is not life if free from passion, From the soft transports love can give;

Indulge your amorous inclination;

Then life is worth the pains to live.

But, if you pass the short-lived pleasure, And leave the luscious draught unknown,

Another claims your slighted treasure, And you have nothing of your own.

Herodotus gives a memorable example of this doctrine in a king of Egypt, who, being warned by an oracle that he had but a short time to

live, immediately ordered his palace to be illuminated from top to bottom with the blaze of torches, and from that moment lived as much as possible every hour of his time in festivity, turning night into day, and giving up his whole soul to the full indulgence of his senses.

But when applied to love, this argument has double force. Life is short, the lover may say, but short as it is, the period allotted to beauty and vigour, to the inclination and power of enjoyment, is but a small portion even of that.

Gather therefore the rose while yet is time,

For soon comes age that will her pride deflower;

Cather the rose of love while yet is time;

While loving thou may'st loved be with equal crime.

SPENSER.

So the Greek poet addresses the mistress whose cruel repulse he has experienced.

Still glorying in thy virgin-flower?
Yet in the gloomy shades of hell
No lovers will adorn thy bow'r-
Love's pleasures with the living dwell
Virgin, we shall be dust alone
On the sad shore of Acheron.

Venus, in an ancient gem, is represented with a wreath of roses in her hand, to indicate the short duration of amorous pleasures; and thus in effect the very same emblem has been made use of in several beautiful epigrams. The first I shall present is very short, but most exqui. site in point of tenderness, justness of thought, and elegance of expression.

Remember, love, the fragrant flow'r

Design'd for thee at peep of morn. Returning both at evening hour, We sought a rose, but found a thorn,

Go, lovely rose !

Tell her that wastes her time and me,

That now she knows,

When I resemble her to thee,

The hour is come; for who with amos rous song

Now wooes thy smile, or celebrates thy bloom?

It concludes thus,

Then die! that she

The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee:

How snrall a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair.

The old Provencals availed them. selves often of the same simile. Peter d'Auverne sends a nightingale to the bower of his beautiful Clairette, instructing the bird to pour out his passionate complaints in her car. The song thus introduced is attended by several romantic and picturesque circumstances; but it concludes in the very style of our Grecian bards: Why do you pause? Embrace love when it is offered! Seize the happy moment! It is a flower that swiftly fades away."

But the ancient poets were not always quite so tender or polite to the cold-hearted fair ones whose barbarity they deplored. The same argument carried a little further we find to degenerate into abuse; and though the amorous minstrels of Greece did not often extend their triumphs over those cruel tyrants, whose hearts had begun to softea just at the season when they were no longer to be prized, to quite the extent that Horace has done in his “ Audivêre, Lyce, Dî mea vota," yet they did not fail to display their exultation when occasion offered. The following reproofs, though a little less uncivil, are on the same model with the ode of Horace; they are both by Rufinus.

Did I not warn thee, Rosaline, that Time

youthful throng,

Feed on the damask of thy blooming prime,

And scatter wrinkles as he pass'd along?

A mortal I, and thou divine,
What mighty victory is thine?
The quiet of my heart is lost;
But thou shouldst rather blush than

boast.

For the Literary Magazine.

shells are found in a continued extent of miles in their original undecom

TION TO AMERICA.

The following remarks are re-published from an English work for the amusement rather than the instruction of the American reader.

THE assertion has been made by many, that the new world holds out advantages not to be found in the old one but this assertion is without truth.

When the Europeans first discovered the continent of North America, their eyes were saluted with an immense expanse of waste encumbered with trees. Beneath them were stagnant and fœtid swamps, for the want of the hand and skill of man to open channels for the passage of the waters; a soil neither solid nor liquid; and marshes covered with aquatic and noisome plants, which served only to nourish venemous insects, whilst they suppressed the growth of herbs fit for the use of man. The green enamelled turf, which forms the beauty of the exterior, and announces the fecundity of the interior of the earth, was no where to be seen. On the few spots which were unencumbered with wood the Indians had built towns, and cultivated maize in some, and others were covered with a tall wiry grass, which the cattle would never touch when they could find the buds of trees, plants, and succulent herbs, which they preferred to it. Every thing denoted that the new world, the mountains excepted, had laid buried beneath the sea for ages after the old one. Later experience has demonstrated this point beyond all doubt. At a very little depth, from eighteen to twenty-five feet beneath the upper stratum, there is found a black saline ooze or mud, the smell of which sufficiently discovers its origin. The upper strata are generally composed of masses of oceanic shells, which time has converted into calcareous stones, and, in many parts, beds of these

one hundred miles from the Atlantic shore, are covered with sea-sand intermixed with gravel, and mud washed down from the Alleghany mountains by the rains, and incrust ed with the remains of decayed vegetation. In a word, nature seemed to have been in a state of infancy, and to have required time to bring her works to perfection. These are all rendered facts by the authority of the American Philosophical Transactions, and the researches of enlightened travellers. Nothing, therefore, but the extravagant avidity and credulity with which mankind receive the account of distant regions could have ever made them believe that Nature, equal and invariable in all her operations, could have done more for a new than an old soil, especially with the art and industry of man against her; and the amazing luxuriance of America must be restricted to vallies where the soil has accumulated to a vast depth, and which are in very inconsiderable quantities relatively to the whole. Even those parts nourish only those grains and herbs which nature has adapted to them, and not to those of the old continent; for which reason the European agriculturist has every thing to learn over again, and experience will only convince him that his labour and expence have been unprofitable. Instead of a soil cultivated for ages, which he may improve at a certain cost, and the replace of which may be ascertained to a sixpence in an acre, he must begin to dry up swamps, to open a passage for stagnant waters, to destroy rank weeds, to fell trees useless through their immense quantity, and finally to produce a new or cultivated nature. For want of hands or money he must do this laborious work himself, and he will find the life of an American farmer very different from that scene of ease, repose, and plenty, which its panegyrists have chaunted forth, even though he

should be settled in the vicinity of the best market town, and on the best cleared lands in the United States.

It should seem that these panegyrists have known no more of it, and have treated it in the same manner. as the ancient poets have. sung to us in the "Golden Age." They have painted it in the most seducing colours; but they have not known, or have omitted to tell us, of the daily cares and labours; they have handled the subject as poets and not as agriculturists, as theorists and not as practical observers: but if those writers had themselves followed the plough for days, exposed to wind and rain; if they had mow ed and stacked hay in the marshes, in the heat of a burning sun, devoured by flies, and tormented by gnats and mosquitoes; if they had reaped the harvests with their backs exposed to the rays of the sun, their face to the exhalations of the earth and dropping perspiration, they would have known, that if by chance the American farmer gathers roses, it is only in midst of thorns. They have not sung those sudden frosts which at the beginning of summer destroy in a single night all hopes of fruit, apples, and cyder; those electric storms which, in the midst of the burning heat of the dog-days, overwhelm him with winter's hail, and scarcely leave him straw when he expected grain. They omit those gusts which come accompanied with torrents of rain, and wash his seeds out of the loose soil; and those flocks of birds which live at the farmer's expence, and pick out of the earth those seeds which have escaped being washed away. They do not mention those circumstances, because they have never experienced, or wished to conceal them. But these are very far from being the whole of the disadvantages attending the American farmer. There are, besides, swarms of insects so various, voracious, and destructive, that they seem to rise only to multiply, to injure vegetation, and to die. In

warm and moist years their fecundity is inconceivable, and their numbers incalculable. The instinct of some leads them to gnaw the bark of trees, others prey upon the leaves, and others again upon the buds. There is nothing sown or planted which has not its enemy; and, that nothing may be exempted from their ravages, the insects of autumn devour the fruit whose buds have escaped the voracity of their predecessors. They say nothing of those worms which attack the stalks of the Indian corn, nor of those Hessian flies* which kill these plants by arresting their sap for their own nutriment, nor of those swarms of capterpillars, which, like a devastating conflagration, lay waste his orchards and woods, and in the midst of summer create the gloomy nakedness of winter. They have totally overlooked all those enemies, so formidable in power, though so contemptible in size. They forget that the years have no spring, nor even a summer and winter of regular duration; and that when to the ravages of so many insects are added the irregularity and inclemency of the seasons, the farmer sustains annually considerable losses, and his only consolation, hope for better luck next season, very often proves delusive. They pass over that it is dangerous to aim at making im

* The inhabitants of Long Island, during the revolutionary war, having perceived that an insect, till then unknown, destroyed their crops of corn in the neighbourhood of the Hessian camp, called it the Hessian fly. So soon as the stalk and the ear are formed, this insect bores the upper and lower parts of the first joint, and deposits its little eggs in the aperture. When the young ones are blown, they intercept the sap sions the death of the plant. and feed on it, which generally occaFrom Long Island this insect has spread over several states, and, as it advances westward, it leaves entirely the places it has before ravaged. It is absurd to suppose that this insect was brought from Eu. rope, the whole natural history of which has none of a similar species

provements, because, from the paucity of hands, and the little dependence which can be placed even on those who will work, there is no saying when they will be finished, and the only certainty is, that of an enormous expence in proportion to the labour done. They do not say that the American farmer is afraid to raise larger crops than he and his family can consume, lest he should get no market for them, or because he is too far distant from any; and that, if he does sell his superfluous produce, he is certain of get ting no money, but only goods in exchange, which are commonly West India or European articles of luxu⚫ ry, which, in his situation, he had better never know the use of. They omit that the crops in the ground are often lost by the sudden transition from winter to summer, without any interval of spring, for want of hands; and that, if labourers could be hired, the crops will not pay the expence. They have not told us that salt pork, or fish with Indian bread, was their only food, and milk or water their most common drink, for cyder is by no means in general use.

Yet all these disadvantages are deplored by the American farmers, although they deem them common to every other country, and are so very apparent, that it must be wilful negligence to pass them over in silence, or gross perversion to have represented them as not existing. Whether you view his crops, or make enquiries of the American farmer, you will see or hear of those enemies at every step; and as it would be ridiculous to attempt to draw any parallel between his situation and that of an European, par: ticularly an English farmer, I shall proceed to show what productions thrive in the United States, and

corn, the staple commodity of American food, and by denying to them great crops of wheat, barley, oats, &c., which are its representative in the old continent. Wheat delights in a stiff soil, which will shelter its roots from the ardent rays of the sun, and the soil of the United States is light, loose, and so permeable, that brooks, creeks, and even rivers, have disappeared. Wheat, therefore, and every other grain which requires a stiff soil, will not thrive there; but Indian corn, which is a strong plant, growing on a stem of from ten to fifteen feet in height, demands a loose soil, which will freely admit those rays to penetrate to its root. This astonishingly productive plant affords nutriment to both man and beast, and is the staff of the United States. For want of a due contexture of the soil, these states are by no means a grass country, but nature has provided against every exigency. The blades of the Indian corn plant furnish all the winter fodder for the cattle, and the woods present them with their buds, shoots, plants, and herbs, in the summer. Were it not for this remarkable production of maize, which thrives in a soil repugnant to all other grains, the United States could not maintain its present population*.

How can the United States, which export so much wheaten flour, be said to be unfavourable to the growth of wheat? The Americans export all they grow, because either from habit they prefer and use only that of Indian corn, or because wheat, which is sure of a foreign market, is the same to the American as cash,

the United States was ascertained, from * In the year 1791, the population of lion of souls; and in 1792, in a stateofficial statements, to be nearly four milment of their exports for that year, as made out by Thomas Jefferson, Esq., then secretary of state, the whole of the bread grains, meals, and bread, exported, amounted to 7,649,887 dollars, which, at the average of that article, would have given a bushel of flour to each person, and no more.

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