The grizzled oak and tall dark pine
Stretch out their boughs from either bank
Across the stream, and many a vine
Festoons them with luxuriance rank.

The yellow jasmine fills the shade
With golden light, and downward shed
From slender wreaths that lightly swayed,
Her fragrant stars upon his head.

But still the boat from dawn to dark
'Neath overhanging shrubs was drawn,
And loosed at eve, the little bark
Safe floated on from dark to dawn.

At length, in that mysterious hour
That comes before the break of day,
The current gained a swifter pow'r,
The boat began to rock and sway;

He felt the wave beneath him swell,
His nostrils drank a fresh salt breath,
The boat of rushes rose and fell—
"Lord! is it life or is it death?"

He saw the eastern heaven spanned
With a slow spreading belt of grey,
Tents glimmered, ghost-like, on the sand,
And phantom ships before him lay;

The sky grew bright, the day awoke,
The sun flash'd up above the sea,
From countless drum and bugle broke,
The joyous northern Réveillé:

Oh, white-winged warriors of the deep!
No heart e'er hailed you so before:
No castaway on desert steep,
Nor banished man, his exile o'er,

Nor drowning wretch lashed to a spar,
So blessed your rescuing sails, as he
Who on them first beheld from far
The morning light of Liberty.

THIS SLAVE'S ESCAPE WAS ACTUALLY MADE
AS DESCRIBED, AND HIS FRAIL BOAT ATTRACTED
GREAT ATTENTION AT THE NEW YORK SANITARY
FAIR; TO WHICH IT WAS SENT BY THE SECRETARY
OF STATE.

DEATH IN THE LATEST FASHIONS.

LET'S do it after the high Roman fashion,
And make Death proud to take us,

said Cleopatra, when planning that most
characteristic of parting scenes on poetical record,
in which " the wrangling Queen" and " the Serpent
of old Nile," to outwit victorious Cæsar,
crowned herself to take her last sad journey,
like the great Queen which she was,—who had
withal been something of a courtesan, which
means something of a coquette.

The deckings of Death by paganism have been
mostly, and are in many countries still, hideous,
elaborate, and splendid. Think of such obsequies
as those of Radama, King of Madagascar
—of such an African rite as the one so
admirably sung by Herr Freiligrath, in which a
horde of living women, with all their warm
treasure of youth and life and beauty, and all
the trash which passes with them for adornment,
are forced, with a ghastly pretext of
willing pride, to share the grave of their lord
and master!

Think of the Suttee, which has been brarely
stood up for, as an East Indian institution—akin
to those of hook-swinging by half-mad Fakirs,
and of the crushing chariot of Juggernaut—by
such fossil legislators of the Circumlocution
Office as would let III alone; this burning of the
widow being only by one shade worse than
another distribution of the dying and dead! Think
of the family festival of the Battas, put on
record by Sir Stamford Raffles in his work on
the Indian Archipelago! They did (if they do
not now) kill, and cook, and eat their grand-
fathers and grandmothers when the same were
proved to be effete and past work. And the
dinner-party given on the occasion passed as
an exceeding sprightly jollification.

But the above, it may be said, are savage
death-ceremonies. Can our United Kingdom,
first and foremost in civilisation, show nothing
(respective circumstances considered)
analogous? London, I am afraid, our head-quarters
of the above-claimed perfection, has given an
answer—and not a stammering one—to this
question within the last few weeks.—In a couple of
examples, it has proved that we can still allow,
as a tribute to a great dead man, no matter whether
ecclesiastic or lay, such a show as a lying in
state—that grim union of Death and upholstery.
The coffin of the Cardinal, so detailed the
daily press, was lined with white and arnber
satin. The diseased face was plastered where
the fatal sores had been: on the feet the shoes
of splendour had been put on. Tiie gloved hands
were garnished by rings more precious than
those the worm will wind round them ere the year
is out. Can it be said that love and reverence
prompted the arrangement of such a masque
of splendour and corruption? Dismal, hollow
lie! Coarse, tawdry disrespect, rather, to the
inevitable Angel, in whose coming there is that
instant, awful summons of change,—not to be
arrested, not to be disguised, by rouge, and
jewels, and millinery, or even by a last bed lined
with white and amber satin!

We have been used to comment freely on the
wasteful arrogance of our ancestors, and on their
battling with the destroyer, inch by inch—ay,
some of them in their own persons. Who has
forgotten Princess Buckingham, the bastard
daughter of our King James the Second, and
her provisions for a state funeral, as recounted
by Walpole? " She has sent for Mr. Anstis,"
he writes to Sir Horace Mann, " and settled the
ceremonial of her burial. On Saturday she was
so ill that she feared dying before all the pomp
was come home; she said, ' Why won't they
send the canopy for me to see? Let them send
it, though the tassels are not finished.' But
yesterday was the greatest stroke of all. She
made her ladies vow to her that, if she should be
senseless, they would not sit down in the room
before she was dead.—She not only," continues
the keen chronicler, " regulated the ceremony of