walk amidst the moonshine and the nightingales, with Jacob Frost's cart
looming in the distance, and the merry sounds of Whitsuntide, the shout,
the laugh, and the song echoing all around us, like "noises of the
air."--_Monthly Magazine._

* * * * *



SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

* * * * *


THE LETTER-WRITER.


Fortune surely shifted me from my birth, or first looked on me in a mood
as splenetic as that of nature, when she produced that most sombre and
unpleasing of trees, the olive; to pursue the simile; I may have
conduced to the comfort of others, nay, even to their convenience and
luxury, but it never availed aught to my own appearance or
circumstances; I went on, like that unhappy-looking tree, decaying in
the trunk and blighting in the branches, and yielding up the produce of
a liberal education and an active nature to the public, but reaping for
my own portion only misfortune and disappointment; I had sprung up in
the wilderness of the world, and I was left to grow or wither as I
might; every one was ready to profit by me when a fruitful season
rendered me available to them, but none cared to toil to give me space
for growth, or to enrich the perishing earth at my unlucky root!