It mingled softly with his dreams
Through all the starry night,
While through the dewy orange boughs
Quivered the clear moonlight.

Yet from that nested loveliness

Went out a wailing cry:

'O, let me breathe my native air Once more before I die!'

His couch stood empty by the wall,
And in his favorite bowers

That sad young face was missed at morn,

And at the shut of flowers.

The Como rolled its crystal tide,
Italia's groves were fair,

But tenderly the peasant named
The stranger in his prayer.

He stood upon the vessel's deck,
His pulse beat fast and high,
And steadfast on the filling sails
He fixed his eager eye.

'O, for one glimpse of that dear shore!
I tearless could depart,

If I might press its coldest clod

Once more upon my heart!'

Long weeks had passed; a faint blue line

In misty distance lay,

And manly hearts and steady eyes

Had sought it day by day.

They sought it for the stranger's sake,
To quench the mania thirst
That strengthened on his wasting frame,
And by his life was nurst.

For he had grown a gentle care,
Through that one, moving cry,
'O, let me breathe my native air
Once more before I die!'

Land! land!-they raised him from his couch,
That on the deck was spread -
One short, faint cry of wild delight-
The artist's soul had fled.

WOOLEN THREADS AND SUNBEAMS.

BY HENRY BACON.

I WAS amused yesterday by a figure with which I met in reading, and it may be that the writer left in his language-what but few are capable of doing the magnetism of his own earnest feelings, for it had an electric effect upon me, and shot through me with wonderful potency. He described one who is ever dashing cold water on enthusiastic sympathies, as a creature through whom if sunbeams passed they would come out woolen threads! The comicality of this similitude may not strike another as it did me, for there is a something in the mind which in its different moods attracts or parries off the lightning of wit, and a lighter cloud than passed by us an hour since does the work of overwhelming now most effectually. I thought of the queer machinery necessary to effect such a change, and wished that it might be patented, and but few rights' sold. The machi

nery we want is like the chemical discoveries which have lately changed bean-poles and cornstalks into material for the manufacture of the finest paper, so that the quill which the crow left as he sprung from the stolen corn may write on the stalk a 'new method' to exterminate the whole species. But Ellsworth's voluminous reports furnish nothing from all Yankee land so strange and detestable as the deviltry of soul that changes sunbeams into woolen threads, and that which is the life and light of the whole creation becomes material for a doublet for a freezing body, if any one has skill enough to weave it.

Sunbeams are made into woolen threads by not a few of the motley crowd of human beings. A smile that shoots from the sparkling orb of the eye of good humor comes back like the fuzz that blows from the stunted green peach, and the merry laugh of whole-hearted joyfulness is returned by the awful wheeze as of the organ when the bellows-boy is too lazy to blow. We meet them everywhere, and many times they present themselves in such a manner, that if we had a foot out of which all contempt had not gone, we should be obliged to use it as a moving argument. In our innocent joys we are interrupted by worse shapes than the Eastern traveler describes, when he sketches his night-home in the desert. With my

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maps and books about me, I wanted light,' says he; they brought me a taper, and immediately from out the silent desert there rushed in a flood of light, unseen before. Monsters of moths of all shapes and hues, that never before perhaps had looked upon the shining of a flame, now madly thronged into my tent, and dashed through the fire of the candle, till they fairly extinguished it with their burning limbs. Those who had failed in obtaining this martyrdom, suddenly became serious, and clung despondingly to the canvass.' A small thing was that little taper, yet without it the maps and books must remain unstudied and unread, and the transient home in the desert was uncheered by any light. And thus it is with the slender tapers of joy which light up the home of the soul, giving us aid to read better the human experience and the books of life. We like not the rushing in of the monster moths of misanthropy and spleen, to battle in our light and extinguish it. No; let them weave their woolen threads from the material of their own storehouse, as the spider does; but, unlike the spider, let them reel their product as they spin, till some poor monk needs it to weave him a new cowl and mantle. It is too dark for any thing else, and too full of prickling thistle points for any healthy soul to

wear.

maps of