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ened, and sick at heart, by his side. It was not till they arrived at his home that a syllable was interchanged between thein. As he then turned, after himself alighting, to assist her from the chaise, she gave a slight scream, and shrinking back, exclaimed, "Ah! there's blood on you!-on your bosom! -on your hand !"

Edward Fletcher then himself for the first time perceived red spots on the whiteness of one of his gloves, and more of the same crimson horror on his bridal vest, and he then knew that Alice had burst a blood-vessel at the moment when she fell forward into his arms. We need not linger longer with the wretched author of so much wretchedness. It suffices to say, that when he that night crossed the threshold of his nuptial chamber, he had rather it had been the portal of hell.

The Baronet found Alice lying inanimate on the ground, supported by her maid, who, together with the clergyman and one or two others who remained by her, was endeavoring to revive her. The whiteness of her dress was here and there fleckered with a light crimson stain, while the blood continued to ooze slowly from both her mouth and nostrils. I hasten to conclude so melancholy a recollection. With great care and difficulty they were able to reach the Hall that night with their burthen of blighted and heart-broken loveliness, borne on a litter. The agonies of father and brother I need not attempt to depict.

On the following morning, though feeble and faint, she was considerably restored; and, while conscious that she had but a few hours yet to live, was in full possession of her faculties.

Supported by the pillows of her bed, she wrote with a trembling hand the following lines, which she sealed, and begged that they might be immediately despatched :

"You have taken the life you once saved. If it is for your happiness, it is willingly given. I would see you, Edward, once more before I go. But if you would receive my farewell blessing yet from my own lips, hasten or it will be in vain. If not, take it by this, for yourself and your fair bride, from ALICE."

Informing her father and brother of what she had done, she claimed for

them all personal forbearance and respectful treatment for Edward when he should come. He came already crushed in spirit, and with the tortures of the damned at his heart. Yet had he not reaped the full fruition of his vengeance, even beyond the measure of his hope or his aim?

His interview with her was long and private. She spoke to him as an angel might speak to the human wretchedness and guilt which its own pure essence fled from, back to heaven, at the same time that it wept over it, would comfort, and purify it. She at last touched a little silver bell that lay by her on the white coverlet, and her father and George entered the room, and stood on the opposite side of the bed from that at which the miserable man was kneeling, his face buried in his hands, and his whole frame heaving with fearful sobbings to issue from the breast of a great strong man.

"I bring you together, before I go," the dying girl thus spoke, in a voice low and trembling, though sweet as some dim spiritual music borne faintly to the ear from the world on whose threshold she was standing, and whose light seemed already reflected upon the unearthly beauty shining on her countenance, "I bring you here together, father -George-Edward-to unite you thus all in my last prayer and my last blessing-so that it will be a sacrilege to my memory and my grave if any further enmity continue between you. We all suffer in a common retribution-you all, for your evil pride and passions-I, for my sin in so wildly loving anything below my God-and most justly for my want of perfect truthfulness to you, dear father. Edward, you have acted awfully, but you stand now more awfully blighted than your victim ;--and father-George-it was you that maddened him to it, and turned to bitterness and poison a heart which nature filled with all sweet and noble things, though it had one element of evil which I knew not, at least in its terrible force. I do not bid you not to mourn me, but I would have you mingle your tears and your hearts, now chastened, I trust, not fruitlessly though so sorely. Edward, as you would have been to me, be to her who now fills the place which was to have been mine. Father, it is hardest to leave you!"- -She sank back exhausted

by the effort she had made, and the intensity of her own feelings. The sweet spell of her words, and the looks that gave them their eloquence, fell upon the hearts of her listeners with a power like the descent of the dove of the holy spirit; and before they parted, at her request, and in her calm sight -so solemn is the sway of the presence of death over the wildest rage of human passions!-so almighty the power of divine forgiveness and love! incredible as it might almost seem, Edward Fletcher had been locked in the arms of the heart-stricken father and the mourning brother, even as might be a son and a brother, by the death-bed of a sister, in the sympathy of a common anguish. Blood and birth were forgotten now.

She did not die till the following day-though she never spoke any more, except a slight motion of her lips in an attempt to join in the services of the church which were performed at her bedside. She passed away so calmly and quietly, that it can be no better described than in the following lines of which I have forgotten the author :

prising that he sank rapidly and fatally, though he died of no particular disease. According to his own request, he was laid by her side, in the family vault. His son may, perhaps, survive still in possession of the baronetcy, though doubtless disjoined for ever from the inordinate family pride which seemed to have made so fatal a part of its inheritance. Edward Fletcher withdrew from that part of the country, selling the patrimony which had also descended to him through many generations. He settled in a rude neighborhood on the west coast of Ireland, within the sound of the great surge of the Atlantic; to whose wild and dark unrest he was, perhaps, attracted by an unconscious sympathy, such as often exists between the soul of man and the mysterious soul of nature and its elements. His eventual fate I do not know. One circumstance only I afterward learned respecting his future life. His marriage was for ever, in one respect, under the shadow, as it were, of a curse. He had many children. One after another they grew up around his board, in an outward show of beauty, which was their natural birthright. They were healthy, too,

"We watched her breathing through the and they neither sickened nor died.

night,

Her breathing soft and low, As o'er her heart the waves of life Came heaving to and fro.

"And still our hopes belied our fears,
Our fears our hopes belied;
We thought her dying when she slept,
And sleeping when she died!"

A few words will conclude all that remains to be told. Edward never came again into contact with any of the family at the Hall. That such a meeting should have been avoided by all was but natural. The old Baronet did not survive his daughter quite a year. All his habits broken up-his accustomed sports and exercise entirely abandoned-his home and heart now all desolate and dark-it is not sur

Yet, whether girl or boy, no one attained the age of seven or eight years, before it became manifest that all this beauty, strength and health, were but the most fearful of mockeries to the eye and heart of the father. They were all pure idiots. And when he looked around upon the ghastly loveliness of the array that would encircle his board, he thought not of any natural physical laws of which they might by others be regarded as a terrible evidence; but, as his eye rested on one after another of his children, he saw in each-and his heart sank and sickened as he sawonly a living and an undying monument of the just moral retributive fruits of his unhallowed and vainly repented revenge.

HOME FLOWERS.

BY ANNA CORA MOWATT.

HOME flowers! dear flowers! as I pause to inhale
The perfume each zephyr hath stole,

What loved recollections are borne on the gale,
And sweep, with your breath, o'er my soul!

Fair flow'rets! what spells round each bud are entwined!
What dreams of the past ye renew!

As, raptured, I gaze, 'mid your rosy leaves shrined,
Lo, memory's mirror I view!

Reflected before me, in brilliant array,

What scenes of enchantment now rise!

Sweet scenes that have faded, as ye must decay,
And bright as your rainbow-hued dyes.

The time-endeared mansion, the bride's early home,
Whose portals joy guarded, I see;

The garden, where erst I delighted to roam,
And feel 'twas an Eden to me.

The vine-covered arbor-mine own shaded bower-
Rise again on my sorrowing sight!

And with them full many a long vanished hour,
By hope and affection made bright.

The tones that I hung on, oh! now I recall,
And love-breathing accents I hear,-

And gleeful-toned laughter, that shook the old hall,
Now peals as of erst on mine ear!

The friends by that hearth that so lovingly thronged

Are crowding around me once more!

The friends! Oh, that thought! who forsook me--who wronged!
And where is the friendship of yore?

This heart's fond affections, how ran they to waste?

This bosom, by whom was it torn?

Go, flow'rets-I linger'd your sweetness to taste,

And now I can feel but your thorn.

THE REBELLION OF FREEDOM.

AN EXTRACT FROM "THE REBEL CHIEFTAIN," A MANUSCRIPT POEM.

BY GEORGE D. STRONG.

"TWAS sunset, and the sceptered Day

But half his golden banner furled,

Reluctant to resign his sway,

And leave so fair, so bright a world;

The sobbing waves had sunk to rest,
Like infant on its mother's breast,
Beneath thy shadow, bleak Cronest!
The placid slumberers, gently fanned
By fragrant breezes from the land.
The smile how bright, the kiss how sweet,
When summer winds and waters meet!
And though the zephyr doth but lave
His warm lip in the amorous wave,
And though unto its swelling breast
The wanderer is but briefly pressed,
Yet have not myriad lovers sworn
Of such fleet joys is rapture born?
While in one fond endearing kiss
Is centred, at a time like this,
A whole eternity of bliss!

The light had paled in hall and bower-
The virgin dew had kissed the flower-
The dog-wood's odorous blossoms swung
Like snowy censers o'er the deep,
And vines, like faithful vassals, clung

To crag and fissure, rock and steep;
But though each sweet, low sound that rose
From vale and thicket, breathed repose,
Yet he who viewed the gathering storm
That lowered o'er manhood's brow of care,
And scanned, in many a varied form,

The stern resolve that triumphed there,
Would deem some moral earthquake throe
Was heaving in the depths below.
The sexton's spade slept by the tomb,
The shuttle paused upon the loom,
The axe reposed within the wood,
The plough-share in the furrow stood,
Inactive lay the useless flail,

The rusty seythe swung from the nail,
No echo from the anvil came,

Mute hung the millstone on its frame,
No more the herd-boy's whistle rang,
But soon was heard the cymbal's clang,
While battle shout and cannon's roar
Shook the vexed earth from sea to shore.
Fierce carnage, then, with crimson trail
Rode like a meteor on the gale,
And leprous wrongs, by hatred nursed,
In lava streams of vengeance burst!
Then forth in dazzling streams of light
Our Eagle standard winged its flight!
Where'er it waved, o'er land or sea,
Uprose the anthems of the free,
Till nations, awed, in wonder gazed,
To where its spangled glories blazed!
They saw before its track of fire
Systems of fraud in pangs expire,
While bigot thrall and despot sway
Were swept like noxious mists away!

DEMOCRACY AND LITERATURE.

THE Literary state has always been represented under the form of a Republic--a free Commonwealth--of all others the most liberal, where every shade of opinion was tolerated, and every varying creed allowed. This polity is not always the same, nor does it possess a character of permanency. On the contrary, its chief defect arises from its instability and tendency to change; changes, sometimes, that threaten to destroy its primitive simplicity and independent republicanism. At one epoch, it is "a fierce democratie," in which a number of candidates happen, at the same time, to be struggling for pre-eminence; at another period, it is a quiet despotism, under which a powerful dictator lords it without opposition over his rivals; but in the latter case this dictator must be a Johnson or a Voltaire, to preserve his supremacy unquestioned. It is now a community of sages presiding in joint and harmonious dignity and power, like the Athenian Archons or the Venetian Council of Ten, the nominal head of whom, for the time being, possesses a nominal superiority conceded by the rest of his associates. Again it sometimes approaches, though very rarely, the haughty pride of an aristocracy, a form it cannot long hold in its integrity, as the literary spirit can no more be confined within such narrow limits, than the spirit of liberty. If, as we find it to have been the case at a few epochs, the republic ever loses any portion of its internal integrity and becomes merged in a monarchy, it may be noticed that its chief or king, is literally--by the birthright of nature, not the lineage of even centuries-a king of men; that his is an elective sovereignty like the kingdom of Poland. This is the only redeeming feature, which plainly implies, that there is no hereditary line of genius royal, though there may be of blood royal. Intellect is too divine a thing to be accidentally transmitted, as wealth and titles are. We generally find the children of great men much inferior to their fathers.

The spirit of Literature and the spirit

of Democracy are one. They both cherish the feeling of man by self-reliance and an untrammelled will; they both speak to the instinctive aspirations of the human soul after liberty of thought and freedom of expression; both recognise in a wise toleration and an intelligent self-dependence the two great principles of all nobility of character and manly achievement. Letters are the best advocates of principles. Philosophy, next to religion, recognising the demands of the Divine will, and acknowledging the dictates of the conscience as the sole source of inviolable authority, forms the best defence of all creeds,human and divine. Thus Literature is not only the natural ally of freedom, political or religious; but it also affords the firmest bulwark the wit of man has yet devised, to protect the interests of freedom. It not only breathes a similar spirit,-it is imbued with the same spirit. It employs analogous means to reach the same end: in what manner and with what effect we shall endeavor to show.

Of all men the author and scholar should come nearest to the ideal of the Patriot. His pursuits, his reflections, his feelings, his mode of life, all tend to that character. Every discovery he makes is for the benefit of his countrymen: every truth vigorously enunciated should instruct them. National honor, national admiration, is more eagerly coveted by him than a wide and undistinguishing regard. He would be loved by those in whose mother tongue he speaks or writes; foreign nations may admire his writings in the gross, but his own countrymen alone can appreciate his individuality of character, and relish the idiomatic graces of his style. From the very nature of things, too, every true writer is an independent, and in some one or more particulars, in however low a degree, is likely to resemble those two grand specimens of the Patriot and Independent united, John Milton and Oliver Cromwell.

His circumstances, too often narrow and circumscribed, impress the noble virtues of fortitude and self-denial, the most efficient tutors of the genuine phi

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