The following is the purport of a lecture on anatomy. The lecturer is
represented as taking up the human skull, containing the brain and its
appendages, with the nervous cords exposed to observation, and with
“_apostrophic eye_” proceeding:--
This is the tenement of thought,
The mansion of the mind,
Whose empire, as the universe,
Is boundless undefined!
’Tis vaulted, like the evening sky
In star-wrought grace unfurl’d,
And like that very firmament,
Hangs o’er a breathing world--
A world of thought, a world of sense,
A world of passion, pride,
Reason, perception, hope, love, light,
In glory side by side!
Here gather, too, in crowded thrall
Of agile grace and hue,
Imagination’s thousand forms
Fast thronging on the view.
Here reason reigns, here genius dwells,
And here ambition lives!
And brightest ’mid that mighty throng,
The soul immortal thrives.
Here, too, imperial will resides
In regal state enshrined,
In stern dominion over all,
With majesty combined!
Mark this! it is his messenger,
That, like electric fire,
Swift-wing’d, the mandate beareth forth
Of reason or desire.
This filament, this very thread,
Hath power to shake the frame;
THAT, whispering to the heart’s warm core,
To light love’s genial flame.
And THIS, or THIS, to sense inclined,
Hath magic in its spell,
To waken pleasure, pain, or hope,
And rapture’s story tell.
And this small cord sent to the eye,
Can comprehend the whole--
The limitless, the vast profound,
Where worlds unnumbered roll!
THAT, to the tongue can captivate,
THIS, epicures enslave,
THAT, to the same makes slander rife,
And THIS perchance a knave.
THAT, to the ear, oft makes the soul
Quake ’neath the thunder’s peal,
Or to the heart, with genius warm’d,
A dream’s low tones reveal.
Concenter’d in one mass, this brain,
These make man what he is,
The offspring of yon world of light,
The life and soul of this.
--_From an American work._
* * * * *
THE RIVER ST JOHN, IN NEW BRUNSWICK.--In this river there are several
falls, not downwards, as in the ordinary course of rivers, but upwards
against the current. The River St John is of the size of the Rhine. It
drains a large portion of the province of New Brunswick. The mass of
water it discharges into the Bay of Fundy is prodigious, especially
during the spring floods, when the tides rise to the height of 35, 50,
and sometimes even 60 feet, above the ordinary level. The remarkable
fall of the water backwards is produced by the enormous volume of water,
occupying a channel in some places ten miles in breadth, being confined
near St John’s into a breadth of 300 yards, which occasions it to roll
back impetuously in the form of a magnificent cascade.
* * * * *
CHILDREN OF THE POOR.--Charles Lamb has truly and touchingly remarked,
that common people’s children “are dragged up, not brought up.” There
is a precocity--not, indeed, of intellect, but of prudence and worldly
wisdom--in them, that is truly painful. Care has usurped the empire of
carelessness, that legitimate monarch of a child’s being; and like
all usurpers, has in the vehemence of his achievements anticipated the
slow march of Time. Life itself, which among the children of the rich
is an exuberant overflowing, that, lavish it as they may, still seems
inexhaustible, among those of the poor is a lean phantom, grasped at with
pain and maintained with a struggle; in short, they know nothing of youth
but its feebleness and its wailing; its bloom and its buoyancy being,
like every other luxury, beyond their reach. To me the most painful sight
in this world is a poor, that is, a destitute child. Whatever misery a
grown-up person may be plunged into, a thousand suppositions are left for
its palliation: they may once have been well off, or they may have been
the artificers of their own ruin, and they may live to see better days:
but children--they can have done nothing to deserve that the one blessing
unmortgaged at the Fall, the carelessness of youth, should be taken from
them.--_Lady Bulwer._