A QUEEN'S CONFESSION.

I'm falling, wasting, dying,

Without plaint or moan,

Life's enchantments all around me,
And the world my own.
Throned aloft in regal splendors,
Should not life be sweet?
With a crown upon my forehead,
Kingdom at my feet.

Every day, adoring suppliants
In my presence bend:

Every day, fresh throng of suitors
For my grace contend.

"Wondrous fair," they call me, "fairest;"

Envy of all eyes;"

I am sick at heart at listening

To their flatteries.

What avail the pomp and lustre

Of my grand estate,

When my woman's heart amidst it
Dwelleth desolate ?

All men's love to me is worthless,
Save the love of one!

Who could see the stars with vision

Dazzled by the sun?

Night and day his image haunts me,
While I sleep or wake;
Little deems he of the anguish
Suffer'd for his sake.

From his sires no borrow'd glory
Blending with his own,
All unrivall'd, mid the famous
He stands first-alone!

His the greatness of a spirit

Gentle, firm, and free;

Grace and goodness are his titles,
Manhood his degree.

Were I but the lowliest maiden,
Loveliest in my land,

But to do him daily service-
Stoop to kiss his hand!

Sunder'd are we, by the false world,

Far as east from west,

Woman's heart what dost thou, beating

In a royal breast?

And so far I seem above him,

While so low I lie,

In the dust-the merest abject

Mock'd with majesty.

Oh, the cruel weight of glory,
Crushing out my life;

The fair semblance glozing over
The fierce inward strife!

Scarce the first peal shall have sounded
Of his bridal bell,

Than its merry tones shall mingle

With my funeral knell.

Woman's life is love. A woman,

If of love denied,

Found a kingdom all too narrow
For my heart-and died! -

-All The Year Round.

For I thocht in them an emblem O' the future I micht see.

I waited for them openin'

In fragrant beauty wide, An' breathin' out their sweetness, As they nestled side by side.

An' I wove the glowin' fancy That a' young lovers ken, O'a lang an' lovin' lifetime

Aye brichter till the en'.

'Twas foolish, ay, anʼsinfu', But true it proved for a'; The red bud blossomed lanely,

The white ane dwined awa'.

O heart! be strong to bear it; O een! frae tears keep free; O life! be pure and nobleAn angel watcheth thee.

'Tis rainy weather, my darling,
Time's waves, they heavily run;
But taking the year together, my dear,
There isn't more cloud than sun.

We are old folks, now, my darling,
Our heads are growing grey,

But taking the year all round, my dear,
You will always find a May.

We have had our May, darling,
And our roses long ago;

And the time of the year is coming,

For the silent night of snow.

And God is God, my darling,

Of night as well as day;

And we feel and know that we can go
Wherever He leads the way.

God of the night, my darling,

Of the night of death so grim,

The gate that leads out of life, good wife, Is the gate that leads to Him.

-Sunday at IIome.

BRIEF NOTES ON BOOKS.

Appleton's Hand Book of Northern Travel, contains the fullest and most reliable information on all matters relating to travel that can be had. The present is the ninth annual edition of this highly useful work, corrected, enlarged, and in various ways improved. It is an important help to one who would travel to advantage in the United States and Canada.

Dombey & Son. By CHARLES DICKENS. With original illustrations. By S. Eytinge, Jr., Boston: Ticknor & Fields. This forms the sixth volume of the Diamond series, which has already become immensely popular. The illustrations are exceedingly spirited, and for the most part well executed.

The Roua Pass; or Englishmen in the Highlands. By ERICK MACKENZIE. Loring, Publisher, Boston. The publisher has added this volume to his Railway Library Series. It was published ten years since in England, where it was favorably received. The Saturday Review commends it highly, especially for its descriptive part relating to Highland scenery and life.

some extracts published by Lord Brougham in his Statesmen of the Reign of King George III., and by Lord Mahon in an Appendix to one of the volumes of his History of England. They present a higher degree of intellect-sagacity mixed with obstinacy and personal prejudicies-than King George had previously got credit for possessing. Now and then, too, traits of generosity are exhibited. The other work, also in two octavo volumes, is of later interest. It may be called the Secret History of the Reform Bill of 1832, and contains The Correspondence of the late Earl Grey with his Majesty King William IV. and Sir Herbert Taylor. During the Reform excitement of 1830-32 Lord grey was prime Minister of England and Sir Herbert Taylor was Private Secretary to King William, whose letters he almost invariably wrote from his private instructions-the alleged reason being that his Majesty wrote with difficulty, from a rheumatic affection in his right hand; but the great probability being that the Secretary, a highly-edu ated man, wrote more elegantly, as well as more grammatically, than the Sailor King who had been sent to sea, as a midshipman in his fourteenth year From this correspondence the

weakness of the monarch's mind is obvious. His wife had inspired him with a horror of Reform, and it was only by adroit management that his Ministers kept him up to the mark, and got him to sustain them in carrying the Reform bill. It may be expected, from statements in these volumes (one of which is that he had great tenderness towards pocket-boroughs), that Lord Brongham will publish some revelations respecting his share in framing and passing the Reform bill.— American Literary Gazette.

Printers and Compositors "The printer is generally sens tive, and far from robust, and is liable to bronchitis, fatigue, and exhaustion; his greatest foe is consumption. Dr. Edward Smith stated in his report that in 100 readers there were 2.75 weeks of sickness yearly per man, and in 10 years 2-3 weeks a year; the yearly mortality among them was 1 in 44, and the average age at death 45 years. Comparing the mortality among printers with the death-rate among agricultural laborers, it was found that between the ages of 35 to 45 among printers it was 1·747, among agricultural laborers 0.05; and between 45 to 55 among printers it was 2·367, among agricultural laborers 1.145. The mortality among compositors from consumption was double that of the whole country; viz. seventy per cent. of the whole, against forty-eight per cent. It cannot be said that the printer is irregular in his habits. Taking printers as a class, they are rather abstemious than otherwise; and if pressmen, whose muscular exertion is greater, are given, together with more food, to a little more drinking, it is pleasing to find that not a few of them are teetotalers, their experience and the lesson of their very life showing that the duties of the pressman can be as easily and efficiently performed by a teetotaler as by the drinker. Printers have charities of their own worthy of every support. Those of Lordon have their Prin ers' Pension, with an annual income of nearly £2000, with which they give handsome pensions to 273 of their disabled members. They have almshouses also, and recently they have established a Printers' Orphan Asylum. The work

of the printer is very arduous, and, as we have seen, most fatal to life. At a meeting for promoting this last benevolent effort, Mr. Charles Reed, the excellent chairman, said: Printers, to use a phrase well understood among themselves, at the best have had hard lines' of it. Theirs was a work which brings into play, not the skilled labor of the hand alone, but the high faculties of the mind; their work was not a work of the day only, but they were found toiling at the midnight hour, and often into the small hours of the morning, to gratify the public taste, and to elevate the intellectual and moral standard of the entire community. In doing this, they expended the bone, the mucle, and the fibre of the pyhsical frame and they drew so largely upon their mental powers that they almost necessarily reduced the amount of vital energy, and rendered themselves more assailable by distemper and disease, falling victims often at an early period of life to the labor they had undergone. This being so, their widows and children are frequently left in a state of difficulty and distress, and they look round in vain for help unless the claim is recognized by their own class.”—Professor Leone Levi.

Population of Great Towns.-The population of the chief cities and towns in the United Kingdom in the middle of the present year is estimated by the Registrar-General as follows:

In a paper On the Orbit of the November Meteors read before the Royal Astronomical Society, Professor Adams demonstrates that the periodic time of the meteors is 33-25 years; consequently, observers will know when to expect their reappearance. The stream of meteors occupies an arc of the orbit, and in passing any given point, produces the surprising effects witnessed last November. From calculations made by foreign astronomers, and tested by Professor Adams, there is reason to conclude that the great comet of 1862 is a part of the same current of matter as that to which the August meteors belong. If verified by further observation, this will be a highly important fact in cosmical science, and astronomers will be busy speculating whether there is any relation between comets and meteors. The agreement in their orbits, it is thought, can hardly be accidental.

Messages from the Stars. The often-expressed wish that we could get messages from the stars has been, in a sense, realized. It is known by recent observations in spectrum analysis, that hydrogen is one of the constituents of a number of the fixed stars. Mr. Graham, Master of the Mint, has experimented on a specimen of meteoric iron, and found it to contain six times more hydrogen than ordinary malleable iron. This

gas must have been absorbed in the atmosphere through which the iron last passed when blazing hot; consequently, this iron brings to us the hydrogen of far remote stars, tells us something of their condition, and we infer that they must have a very dense atmosphere of hydrogen gas. In a short paper on this important subject, read before the Royal Society, Mr. Graham remarks that the dense atmosphere here referred to must be sought for beyond the light cometary matter floating about within the limits of the solar system. This opens a grand question in cosmical science: if Mr Graham can throw further light on it by fresh investigations of meteorities, his name and fame will be deservedly magnified. He, working in his laboratory, and collecting gases by an aspirator, and the astronomer with his spectroscope, are both endeavoring to solve some of the mysteries of the universe.

Dante in Dutch.-An event in literature has occured in Holland. A Dutch man of letters, Mr. Hacke van Mynden, has published a very exact translation of Dante's "Divina Comme

dia." The Dutch are in raptures with the terza rima versification. The following specimen is from the Inferno," Canto 3:

Tan vatte bij mije hand, en wel tovreden

Zag hij mij aan, en schonk mij nieuwe krachten. Zo daalden we in den afgrond naar beneden. Waar zuchten, lui le kreten jammerklichten, Die duistre sterrelooze luchte doorboorden, Zoodat ze mij tot droeve tranen brachten. The" Pall Mall Gazette," quoting and commenting upon these passages, remarks: "This is the first Dutch work on Dante of which we can ascertain the existence The Swedes have had since 1867 N. Lovéa's complete version of the "Comedy" in terza rima, with somewhat copious notes, &c. The Russians have only a prose version of the "Inferno" (with Flaxman's illustrations). The Hungarians have hitherto confined their attention to the Vita Nuova." The Spanish possess the oldest European translation of the Inferno," which was composed by Arch-deacon Villegas, in stanzas of eight verses, de arte mayor, or containing four feet of unequal lengths. It was published in 1515, under the patronage of Queen Johanna, and still stands alone in the language. The last version of the "Comedy" in Latin (hexameters) was writen by the Abbé Della Piazza in 1848: the introduction by the erudide critic, Carl Witte, comprises several specimens of Latin and French versions besides the Spanish one. Of the other French translations, as of the German, the number is considerable. Several of the Teutonic languages seem to lend themselves with more ease than English to Dante's metre, inasmuch as they supply a larger proportion of paroxy toue words suited to the double rhymes.”—American Literary Gazette.

Thackeray."Shortly before his death, Thackeray amused a party of literary friends by recalling some early trials arising from his brief connection with a daily paper on which he was engaged as a literary reviewer. One of the first works submitted to the writer was Roscoe's Life and Works of Henry Fielding,' an author of whose productions, with the single exception of Tom Jones,' he was at that time totally ignorant. Unwilling to acknowledge his unfit

ness for the task, the future novelist set to work, and after concientiously reading every line of Roscoe's bulky volume, sent in a review for which he eventually received a payment that was poor remuneration for the ten days of preliminary study which he went through ere he took pen in hand. Still suffering from the exhaustion cons quent upon this ill paid service, he was required to perform a still more Herculean labor. On returning to his chamber from an afternoon's walk, he found piled high upon his tab e, and cumbering all his more massive furniture, the entire series of volumes forming the new edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.' On his desk lay a note from his editor, requesting him forthwith to review the terrifying array of closely-printed quartos. At this point of his story the narrator was interrupted with the enquiry, What did you do with them ?The only thing that an honest journalist could do under the circumstances,' was the answer, I packed the books in a cab, and sent them straight back to Printing House Square.'”—Athenæum.

An Oll House-The pub'ishing house of Rvington & Co., London, which still flourishes, was founded as far back as the year 1711, in the reign of Queen Anne, and is, perhaps, the oldest in England. Mr. John Rivington has just retired from the firm in which he has been a partner for thirty-one years, and the business will now be carried on by Mr. Francis Hansard Rivington, the sixth in descent from the founder of the house.

The Prussian monarchy, which bids fair to supercede the imperial rule of Austria in Germany, was established only eleven years before the publishing and book-elling house of Rivington was founded -Ilid.

Gas Waste in London..-The quantity of gas made by the several metropolitan gs companies is about 10,410,00 000 cabic feet per annum; the gas sold may be taken at 9,000,000,000 cubic feet per annum. The difference between these quantities is the amount of the less incident to the distribution; in act, so much worse than pure waste, as it is injurious to health on being absorbed into the earth and expended in the air. This is what the gas companies sy. The manufacture consumes neatly a mill on and a quarter tons of coal a year; the los represents, according to the statement of the opponents of the gas companies, 1,44,000,000 cubic feet, which, at the mean cost of 4s 8d per thousand, is worth £336 0.0 per annum.

Libraries in Bogotá.--From an esteemed correspondent we have received the following:The public library in Bogotá, founded by Francisco Antonio Moreno y Escandon.my greatgrand-father, who died as Regeut of Chile at the end of the last century, has from 40 000 to 45,000 volumes, not reckoning the 20,000 lately added, and among them some very good biographical curiosities. It has a printed catalogue, and is served by a librarian whose appointments are 800 dollars per anum. It is open every day from 10 to 2 o'clock, except on Sundays. The convents possessed very good libraries, but those Institutious being abolished in 1861, their books have been taken to the public library; there may be about 20,000 of them, the best