LADY'S AND GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE, EMBELLISHED WITH MEZZOTINT AND STEEL ENGRAVINGS, MUSIC, ETC. WILLIAM C. BRYANT, J. FENIMORE COOPER, RICHARD H. DANA, JAMES K. PAULDING, HENRY GEORGE R. GRAHAM, EDITOR AND PROPRIETOR. VOLUME XXIII. PHILADELPHIA: GEORGE R. GRAHAM, NO. 98 CHESNUT STREET. 1843. An Autumn Landscape. By ALFRED B. STREET, 276 | The Fountain: A Night Reverie. By GEORGE A Dream of the Past. By CAROline Orne, Death the Deliverer. By Hon. R. T. CONRAD, Do Not Despair. By S. D. PATTERSON, Evening and Morning. By T. B. READ, 276 G. FOSTER, 104 The Heart's Fount of Strength. By SARAH J. 110 The Minstrel's Curse. By W. PITT PALMER, 137 267 Ir is many years since an individual of singular appearance took up his abode in the vicinity of a populous town-an unusual choice of place for one whom misfortune or misanthropy seemed to have rendered averse to human society, but not an injudicious one in this case, since the spot afforded the solitude of the desert without its remoteness from succor. His humble dwelling, constructed with little skill or care, and scarcely discernible in the tangled thicket, was situated upon a rough hill that rose with picturesque abruptness from the level plain; toward the town rocky and precipitous, but descending on the opposite side with a softer outline. The gray rock was in some places naked to the sun; in others, covered with soil for the most part closely wooded. One spot, in the very midst of the deep shade, was susceptible of cultivation. It was but a strip, but it repaid the rude culture of the recluse with food sufficient for him, and served also to pasture two or three sheep-not doomed to bleed for their master's gratification, but to be harnessed with strips of bark to a little cart, which served him many useful purposes during the Summer, and when Autumn blasts began to lay bare the branches, bore his few movables toward the pleasant south. No one knew where he made his winter abode; but the flitting was regular as that of the birds, and when they and the flowers returned, back came our hermit to his hovel on the rock. dom disturbed or intruded upon. Curiosity had subsided, and the determined silence of the recluse was not calculated to induce a chance visiter to repeat his visit. Strangers were sometimes taken to the hermitage, but to those who had associated the flowing beard, staff, cross and rosary with the idea of a hermit, our recluse seemed but a poor representation of the class. He was a coarse, rough-looking person, clothed in a sort of Robinson Crusoe style; and his whole air was one which the most romantic imagination would have found it difficult to invest with the character of saintly repose which always marks the hermit of story. A student would sometimes terminate his ramble by a short rest in the bough-roofed hovel, or a schoolboy spend his Saturday afternoon in its neighborhood, for the sake of sharing the contents of his basket with the lonely tenant; and in such cases the reception offered by the recluse was quiet but kind, and the offered dainties usually repaid by the gift of some of nature's treasures, which an out-door life enabled him to procure. He would heat his rude oven, and bake apples and potatoes for them, while they gathered berries or rambled through the craggy solitudes. But he scarcely ever spoke, and most of his days were passed in absolute solitude. The accounts I had heard had aroused no little interest or curiosity respecting this strange being, when I was one day informed that the hermit was in the kitchen, and had asked leave to take-not exactly "the husks that the swine did eat"-but a piece of When we first heard of his existence, he was sel- white bread which had been consigned to that base |