I have known a spirit calmer
    Than the calmest lake, and clear
  As the heavens that gazed upon it,
    With no wave of hope or fear;
  But a storm had swept across it,
    And its deepest depths were stirr'd
  Never, never more to slumber,
    Only by a word.

  I have known a word more gentle
    Than the breath of summer air,
  In a listening heart it nestled,
    And it lived for ever there.
  Not the beating of its prison
    Stirr'd it ever, night or day:
  Only with the heart's last throbbing
    Could it fade away.

  Words are mighty, words are living:
    Serpents with their venomous stings,
  Or bright angels, crowding round us
    With heaven's light upon their wings:
  Every word has its own spirit,
    True or false, that never dies;
  Every word man's lips have utter'd
    Echoes in God's skies.

OVER, UNDER, OR THROUGH?

I AGREE with the schoolmaster. If
Britannia rules the waves, certainly she ought
to rule them straighter; for of all the evils
which flesh is heir to, sea-sickness is one of
the worst. Cynical stoics will tell you, that it
does you good. Don't believe them. Like
several other wonderful specifics, it sometimes
kills instead of curing; while, in any case,
the discipline undergone is so severe, that life
or death is, for the time being, a matter of
perfect indifference. Even the cynical stoics
themselves, with all their kind advice to others,
have searched out a variety of inventions
for the warding off of sea-sickness,—they have
concocted prophylactic elixirs, and have girded
tight their sensitive waists with protective
leathern straps; all in vain. Any preservative,
if effectual, would make the happy
inventor's fortune. Science, physiology, and
medical lore, have been obliged to be
content with the palliative, during a short
passage, of a recumbent position, and forty
drops of laudanum taken immediately before
starting to cross the Strait.

The packet-service between Dover and
Calais is performed by very beautiful boats
as nearly perfect as it is possible to imagine.
A fatal wreck of any of these—I am not
writing of Dover and Ostend—is not, I
believe, on record. They are navigated by
able and experienced men, who know to a
hair's breadth what may, and what may not,
be done in the Channel; and if the weather
rose to danger point, no passenger-boat woud
put out to sea. But the letter-carrying
steamers run to and fro with great exactness,
and the persons who command and work
them well, earn all the pay they receive.
They are really heroic in their contempt of
storms and in their devotion to punctuality
and public duty. A fair passage is
performed in an hour and a-half from harbour
to harbour; often it is half an hour longer;
occasionally, it is a little less. Folkestone
and Boulogne being further apart, the run
necessarily occupies a more protracted space
of time, but is equally safe and almost as
certain. In either case, all things considered,
and in spite of the merciless malady, there is
much reason to be satisfied with the present
mode of transit over the water.

But, still the aforesaid malady is ever
present and unyielding when the waves are
rough, and it is often the Atra Cura, the Black
Care, which embitters the prospect of a
continental trip. One mode of escaping the
enemy has lately been suggested, which
undoubtedly would prove effectual, if carried
out; it is a question, however, whether this
horn of the dilemma would not be more
unpleasant and even dangerous than the other.
The frying-pan is not a pleasant resting-
place, says the proverb, but the fire is a great
deal worse.

Now, those who have ever crossed the
Thames by means of the Rotherhithe Tunnel
—who have gasped for a breath of vital air,
and have felt a cold shudder run through
them as they heard the drip of the oozing
water—those who have been at the bottom
of that Cornish mine which runs under the
sea, where the men sometimes leave off work
in alarm when the stormy tide rattles the
rocks overhead—will have had some
foretaste of the scheme now entertained of
joining England and France by a submarine
tunnel. The enterprise, which is serious in
every sense of the word, is not an absolute
novelty. The first and most remarkable
project for crossing the Straits of Dover by a
solid road, was started by Mathieu, the
mining-engineer, whose plan was presented
to the First Consul in eighteen hundred and
two. The peace of Amiens had just been
concluded. Fox went to Paris, where he was
informed of the international plan of junction.
He conversed with the First Consul on the
subject, and Bonaparte, astonished at the broad
views of his guest, said: "Ah! it is one of
those great things that you and I might
accomplish together."

Mathieu's proposal consisted of a subterranean
road formed by two arched roads or
ways, built one over the other, describing in
their passage a broken straight line whose
culminating point was the middle of the
Strait, and sloping thence by two inclined
planes towards France and England. The
lower arch was to serve as a drain for any
chance inroad of water, which would be got
rid of at the two extremities by means of
reservoirs from which it would be pumped.
Beneath the upper-arch, was to be made a
road lighted by oil-lamps. The most
extraordinary circumstance connected with this
bold invention was, that it was conceived at