not be, that it was not. And it was some time before I under. stood the true character of the scene before me, so as to separato the city from the country, and the country from the city, which here wonderfully interpenetrated each other, and so confound and deceive the observer. For the city proper is so studded with groups of lofty palm-trees, shooting up among its temples and palaces, and, on the other hand, the plain in its immediate vicinity is so thickly adorned with magnificent structures of the purest marble, that it is not easy, nay, it is impossible, at the dis tance at which I contemplated the whole, to distinguish the line which divided the one from the other. It was all city and all country, all country and all city. Those which lay before me I was ready to believe were the Elysian Fields. I imagined that I saw under my feet the dwellings of purified men and of gods. Certainly they were too glorious for the mere earth-born. There was a central point, however, which chiefly fixed my attention, where the vast Temple of the Sun stretched upwards its thousand columns of polished marble to the heavens, in its matchless beauty, casting into the shade every other work of art of which the world can boast. I have stood before the Parthenon, and have almost worshipped that divine achievement of the immortal Phidias. But it is a toy by the side of this bright crown of the Eastern capital. I have been at Milan, at Ephesus, at Alexandria, at Antioch; but in neither of those renowned cities have I beheld any thing that I can allow to approach, in united extent, grandeur, and most consummate beauty, this almost more than work of man. On each side of this, the central point, there rose upwards slender pyramids-pointed obelisks-domes of the most graceful proportions, columns, arches, and lofty towers, for number and for form, beyond my power to describe. These buildings, as well as the walls of the city, being all either of white marble, or of some stone as white, and being everywhere in their whole extent interspersed, as I have already said, with multitudes. of overshadowing palm-trees, perfectly filled and satisfied my sense of beauty, and made me feel for the moment as if in such a scene I should love to dwell, and there end my days.

PALMYRA AFTER ITS CAPTURE AND DESTRUCTION

No language which I can use, my Curtius, can give you any just conception of the horrors which met our view on the way to the walls and in the city itself. For more than a mile before we reached the gates, the roads, and the fields on either hand, were strewed with the bodies of those who, in their attempts to escape, had been overtaken by the enemy and slain. Many a group of bodies did we notice, evidently those of a family, the parents and

the children, who, hoping to reach in company some place of security, had all-and without resistance, apparently-fallen a sacrifice to the relentless fury of their pursuers. Immediately in the vicinity of the walls, and under them, the earth was concealed from the eye by the multitudes of the slain, and all objects were stained with the one hue of blood. Upon passing the gates, and entering within those walls which I had been accustomed to regard as embracing in their wide and graceful sweep the most beautiful city in the world, my eye met nought but black and smoking ruins, fallen houses and temples, the streets choked with piles of still blazing timbers and the half-burned bodies of the dead. As I penetrated farther into the heart of the city, and to its better-built and more spacious quarters, I found the destruction to be less, that the principal streets were standing, and many of the more distinguished structures. But everywhere-in the streets-upon the porticos of private and public dwellings-upon the steps and within the very walls of the temples of every faith -in all places, the most sacred as well as the most common, lay the mangled carcasses of the wretched inhabitants. None, apparently, had been spared. The aged were there, with their bald or silvered heads-little children and infants-women, the young, the beautiful, the good,-all were there, slaughtered in every imaginable way, and presenting to the eye spectacles of horror and of grief enough to break the heart and craze the brain. For one could not but go back to the day and the hour when they died, and suffer with these innocent thousands a part of what they suffered, when, the gates of the city giving way, the infuriated soldiery poured in, and, with death written in their faces and clamoring on their tongues, their quiet houses were invaded, and, resisting or unresisting, they all fell together, beneath the murderous knives of the savage foe. What shrieks then rent and filled the air-what prayers of agony went up to the gods for life to those whose ears on mercy's side were adders'-what piercing supplications that life might be taken and honor spared! The apartments of the rich and the noble presented the most harrowing spectacles, where the inmates, delicately nurtured and knowing of danger, evil, and wrong only by name and report, had first endured all that nature most abhors, and then there, where their souls had died, were slain by their brutal violators with every circumstance of most demoniac cruelty.

Oh, miserable condition of humanity! Why is it that to man have been given passions which he cannot tame, and which sink him below the brute? Why is it that a few ambitious are permitted by the Great Ruler, in the selfish pursuit of their own aggrandizement, to scatter in ruin, desolation, and death, whole kingdoms, making misery and destruction the steps by which

they mount up to their seats of pride?

O gentle doctrine of Christ!-doctrine of love and of peace,-when shall it be that I and all mankind shall know Thy truth, and the world smile with a new happiness under Thy life-giving reign!

JOHN G. C. BRAINARD, 1796-1828.

Thou art sleeping calmly, Brainard; but the fame denied thee when
Thy way was with the multitude-the living tide of men-

Is burning o'er thy sepulchre,-a holy light and strong;
And gifted ones are kneeling there, to breathe thy words of song,-
The beautiful and pure of soul,-the lights of Earth's cold bowers,
Are twining on thy funeral-stone a coronal of flowers!

Ay, freely hath the tear been given, and freely hath gone forth
The sigh of grief, that one like thee should pass away from Earth;
Yet those who mourn thee, mourn thee not like those to whom is given-
No soothing hope, no blissful thought, of parted friends in Heaven:
They feel that thou wast summon'd to the Christian's high reward,-

The everlasting joy of those whose trust is in the Lord!-J. G. WHITTIER.

JOHN GARDNER CALKINS BRAINARD, son of the Honorable J. G. Brainard, one of the Judges of the Supreme Court of Connecticut, was born in New London, on the 21st of October, 1796, and graduated at Yale College in 1815. On leaving college, he studied law, and commenced the practice of it at Middleton; but, the profession not being congenial to his tastes, he abandoned it, and, in 1822, undertook the editorial charge of the "Connecticut Mirror," at Hartford, which for five years he enriched with his beautiful poetical productions and chaste and elevated prose compositions. His pieces were extensively copied, often with very high encomium, and the influence his paper exerted over its readers could not but be purifying and elevating. But consumption had marked him for her own; and in less than five years he returned to his father's house, at New London, where, with calm and Christian resignation,' he expired on the 26th of September, 1828. In 1825, a volume of his poems was published in New York, mostly made up from the columns of his newspaper. After his death, a second edition appeared, in 1832, enlarged from the first, with the title of Literary Remains, accompanied by a just and feeling memoir by the poet Whittier, a kindred spirit, and one every way calculated to appreciate and illustrate his subject.2

I Just before his death, he remarked, "The plan of salvation in the gospel is all that I wish for: it fills me with wonder and gratitude, and makes the prospect of death not only peaceful but joyful."

2 The sketch of Brainard's life in Kettell's "Specimens" was written by S. G. Goodrich. In 1842, a beautiful edition of his poems was published at Hartford, by Edward Hopkins, accompanied by a portrait, and by an admirable memoir written by Rev. Royal Robins, of Berlin, Connecticut.

THE FALL OF NIAGARA.1

The thoughts are strange that crowd into my brain,
While I look upward to thee. It would seem
As if God pour'd thee from his "hollow hand,"
And hung his bow upon thine awful front;

And spoke in that loud voice, which seem'd to him
Who dwelt in Patmos for his Saviour's sake,
"The sound of many waters;" and had bade
Thy flood to chronicle the ages back,

And notch His centuries in the eternal rocks.

Deep calleth unto deep. And what are we,
That hear the question of that voice sublime?
Oh! what are all the notes that ever rung
From war's vain trumpet, by thy thundering side!
Yea, what is all the riot man can make

In his short life, to thy unceasing roar !
And yet, bold babbler, what art thou to HIM,
Who drown'd a world, and heap'd the waters far
Above its loftiest mountains?-a light wave,
That breaks, and whispers of its Maker's might.

EPITHALAMIUM.

I saw two clouds at morning,
Tinged with the rising sun;
And in the dawn they floated on,

And mingled into one:

I thought that morning cloud was blest,

It moved so sweetly to the west.

I saw two summer currents,

Flow smoothly to their meeting,

And join their course, with silent force,

In peace each other greeting:

Calm was their course through banks of green,
While dimpling eddies play'd between.

Such be your gentle motion,

Till life's last pulse shall beat;

Like summer's beam, and summer's stream,

Float on, in joy, to meet

A calmer sea, where storms shall cease-
A purer sky, where all is peace.

Be it remembered that this piece was thrown off in the inspiration of the moment, on a cold, stormy evening, when, feeble from disease, he could hardly drag his way to the office of his paper, and when the printer's boy came clamoring to him for "copy." He wrote the first verse, and told the boy to come in fifteen minutes for the rest. He did so, and the poet gave him the second. Of it, as a whole, Jared Sparks, in the twenty-second volume of the "North American Review," thus remarks:-"Among all the tributes of the Muses to that great wonder of nature, we do not remember any so comprehensive and forcible, and at the same time so graphically correct, as this."

ON A LATE LOSS.1

"He shall not float upon his watery bier
Unwept."

The breath of air that stirs the harp's soft string,
Floats on to join the whirlwind and the storm;
The drops of dew exhaled from flowers of spring,
Rise and assume the tempest's threatening form;
The first mild beam of morning's glorious sun,

Ere night, is sporting in the lightning's flash;
And the smooth stream, that flows in quiet on,
Moves but to aid the overwhelming dash
That wave and wind can muster, when the might
Of earth, and air, and sea, and sky unite.

So science whisper'd in thy charmed ear,
And radiant learning beckon'd thee away.
The breeze was music to thee, and the clear

Beam of thy morning promised a bright day.
And they have wreck'd thee!-But there is a shore

Where storms are hush'd-where tempests never rage

Where angry skies and blackening seas no more

With gusty strength their roaring warfare wage.

By thee its peaceful margent shall be trod-
Thy home is heaven, and thy friend is God.

LEATHER STOCKING."

Far away from the hill-side, the lake, and the hamlet,
The rock, and the brook, and yon meadow so gay;
From the footpath that winds by the side of the streamlet;
From his hut, and the grave of his friend, far away-
He is gone where the footsteps of men never ventured,
Where the glooms of the wild-tangled forest are centred,
Where no beam of the sun or the sweet moon has entered,
No bloodhound has roused up the deer with his bay.

Light be the heart of the poor lonely wanderer;
Firm be his step through each wearisome mile-
Far from the cruel man, far from the plunderer,
Far from the track of the mean and the vile.

1 Alexander Metcalf Fisher, Professor of Mathematics in Yale College, anxious to enlarge his knowledge in his favorite science, to which he had devoted his life, set sail for Europe in the packet-ship Albion, which was lost in a terrific storm off the coast of Ireland, April 22, 1822. But few of the passengers or rew were saved; and among the lost was the promising and gifted subject of these lines. See the fourth volume of the "New-Englander" for a fine memoir of Professor Fisher, by Professor Denison Olmsted.

2 These lines refer to the good wishes which Elizabeth, in Mr. Cooper's novel of "The Pioneers," seems to have manifested, in the last chapter, for the welfare of "Leather Stocking," when he signified, at the grave of the Indian, his determination to quit the settlements of men for the unexplored forests of the West, and when, whistling to his dogs, with his rifle on his shoulder, and his pack on his back, he left the village of Templeton.