bethought him of conveying away the body; but after he had raked it from the ashes, it was so hot that he was compelled to leave it to cool, before he could remove it. The day was dawning, and his work was not accomplished! He then dragged the corse up beside a rail-fence, where it lay about twenty steps from the road all day, a frightful wreck of mortality; the arms burned off, the legs calcined to a cinder, and only a small portion of the head clinging to the trunk! At night he took the body and buried it in a potato-hole; but still the fear that it would be discovered, tormented him sore, and he again took it up and carried it in his arms about two miles through the dark old forest, and buried it in a hollow tree. In the course of Monday, he again went to the spot where the body was interred, terrified lest the dogs, in ranging the wood, should discover his crime. But there was upon him an Eye, from whose glance he could not hide; and his own conscience haunted him with its terrible thunderings! This will forcibly remind the reader of the poetic truth of HOOD's 'Dream of Eugene Aram.' The schoolmaster, it will be remembered, has cast the body into a deep stream of 'sluggish water, black as ink;' and after sitting awhile among the innocent children of his school, he dismisses them for the night:

'Oh heaven! to think of their white souls,
And mine so black and grim!

I could not share in childish prayer,

Nor join in evening hymn:

Like a devil of the pit I seem'd,

'Mid holy cherubim!

And peace went with them one and all,
And each calm pillow spread;

But Guilt was my grim chamberlain
That lighted me to bed,

And drew my midnight curtains round,
With fingers bloody red!'

A night of restless agony is followed by a yearning temptation, that urges him to 'go and see the dead man in his grave:'

'Heavily I rose up as soon

As light was in the sky-
And sought the black, accursed pool
With a wild misgiving eye;

And I saw the dead in the river's bed,
For the faithless stream was dry!

'Merrily rose the lark, and shook
The dew-drop from its wing;

But I never mark'd its morning flight,
I never heard it sing:

For I was stooping once again
Under the horrid thing.

"With breathless speed, like a soul in chase,

I took him up and ran

There was no time to dig a grave

Before the day began:

In a lonesome wood, with heaps of leaves,

I hid the murdered man!

And all that day I read in school,

But my thought was otherwhere;

As soon as the mid-day task was done,

In secret I was there:

And a mighty wind had swept the leaves,
And still the corse was bare!

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE. We make the following extract from a late epistle of an estimable friend and eminent vocalist, now in his native land of Scotland, with whose high professional and personal merits our readers in the cities of the Atlantic sea-board are not unacquainted. We rejoice to hear that he has been most cordially welcomed 'bock agen' by his countrymen, from whom he has received the most gratifying testimonials of approbation. He writes us from Dublin, where his success had been most abundant, under date of January 2d: 'It is some four or five years since I was in this quarter of the world, and the change that is now perceptible on the face of men and things is astonishing. You of course have heard of FATHER MATTHEW, and his teetotal pledges, and perhaps thought of it as I did, that it was all humbug; that the Father must be a fanatic, and that it was such a thing as would soon blow over. But it is not so. It is ascertained that upward of three millions of souls in Ireland have taken the pledge; the consequence of which is, that instead of the hundreds and thousands of beggars that were wont to infest the streets, some of them with scarcely any clothing upon them, you now rarely see one. It used to be difficult to discover what was, or had been, the original color or texture of a poor Irishman's coat; in fact, it was a thing to baffle all research. It is now far different. The lower orders are comparatively well clad, and clean. The distilleries are all turned into flour-mills, and the public houses have van

ished. On last St. Patrick's day, although the streets were covered with dense crowds of people, there was not a 'tipsy' man to be seen. In former times, an Irishman would have considered himself disgracing his saint, his country, and himself, if he did not get beastly drunk on that day. All this reformation has arisen out of the exertions of Father Matthew, who I hear is an excellent fellow, and any thing but a bigot. He is now erecting a chapel in Cork, out of the proceeds of the sale of shilling teetotal pledge-medals, that will cost nearly eighty thousand pounds, and which, when finished, will rival in magnificence of design and beauty of architecture, any other building in Europe. The taking of the pledge is not confined to the lower orders. Many who move in the first circles of society have taken it; and what astonishes me most of all, is, that many of the car-men have taken it, who used to be 'screamers' in the drinking way... Have you read Prof. Wilson's Essay on the Genius and Character of Burns, affixed to the work entitled 'The Land of Burns,' edited by himself and Robert Chambers? If not, do so, and if you do not revel in its flow of eloquence, and stream of glorious, fine, manly feeling, I am mistaken. I was sitting in Blackwood's back-shop a few days ago, enjoying it, when the Professor walked in, looking as hale and hearty almost as ever. Since the death of his wife, he has been very low in spirits, but he has now started afresh, and taken out a new lease of youth and manhood, in mind and body.'

THE DIAL.We have the January issue of this quarterly publication, and 'have to note,' as the prices-current term it, 'a still farther improvement.' Transcendentalism 'in first hands' is certainly looking up.' In second hands, purchasers are shy. But similitude aside the present number of the 'Dial' is more to our taste, and we think a better number, than either of its predecessors. We proceed to set forth the grounds of our conviction, in a few extracts from, and a running commentary upon, some of the more prominent papers. In 'Man in the Ages,' the opening article, there are fine thoughts, which no affectation of language could wholly hide. Take, for example, the following tribute to Freedom:

sneer.

'I have lived indeed to hear that blessed name taken in vain, used in caricature, uttered with a It will not be so always. It was not so once. It has been a sacred word. Bards sang it. Prophets proclaimed it. Noble men died for it, and felt the price cheap. None counted how much gold could be coined out of fetters. Dimly seen, imperfectly understood, its dimmest shapes, its shadowy visions, even rising amidst bloody clouds, have been heralds of joy. Not brighter, more glad, to the forlorn and weary traveller, the first rays which look out through the golden dawn, than to commonwealths and men, the day-break of liberty; nor is light itself, or any exterior thing of good cheer to man conscious of bondage. Order, conservation, tradition, prescription, political constitutions, laws of nations, sanctions of the ages, these are all nothing to the unwritten, unseen, invisible law of true freedom in man's soul. Those are of men, this of man; those, of the world; this, of God. I may regret, to be sure, that a dagger should have ever been hidden in myrtle bough; I may mourn that in the name of Liberty the least wrong should ever be done; would that the blessed form needed never but voice soft as the gentlest evening wind! More deeply should I mourn, my tears more hopeless, if I saw her assailed, nor hand nor voice lifted in the defence. Nay, as in worst superstition I welcome the divine idea of Religion; as through dreams and filthy tales of mythology, I see and bless the living God, nor ever feel more sure, that God is, that Truth is, and that man is made for God and Truth; so in and through frantic excesses of an incomplete and infantile Freedom, I see, I feel, that Freedom is, and is sacred, and that it is every thing to the soul of man. Carry me to Paris in the frenzy of its revolution; carry me to St. Domingo, in the storm of its insurrection; carry me to Bunker Hill, amid its carnage; carry me to Thermopylae, while its three hundred wait the sure death; set me beside those whose names may scarce be uttered without contempt or hate, a Wat Tyler or a Nat Turner; set me where and with whom you will, be it but man struggling to be free, to be himself, I recognise a divine presence, and wish not to withhold homage. Pardon me; but in a slavish quietude of the ages, I see nothing but despondency; freedom, be it wild as it may, quickens my hope. The wildness is an accident which will pass soon; that slavish quietude is death.'

There is poetry in 'Questionings,' and aspirations that will remind the reader of winged fancies that flit through the mind on a summer's eventide :

The eighth paper is a sort of autobiography of a Magnolia tree. There came a chilling frost, unhappily, and killed it; which it thus describes :

'One starlight night I was looking, hoping, when a sudden breeze came up. It touched me, I thought, as if it were a cold white beam from those stranger worlds. The cold gained upon my heart, every blossom trembled, every leaf grew brittle, and the fruit began to seem unconnected with the stem. Soon I lost all feeling, and morning found the pride of the garden black, stiff, and powerless.' As the rays of the morning sun touched me, consciousness returned, and I strove to speak, but in vain. Sealed were my fountains, and all my heart-beats still. I felt that I had been that beauteous tree, but now only was what I knew not; yet I was, and the voices of men said, It is dead; cast it forth and plant another in the costly vase. A mystic shudder of pale joy then separated me wholly from my former abode.'

What is a mystic shudder of pale joy?' 'Take a step inward,' reader, and oblige us with an answer.

The true dignity and end of well-directed labor are forcibly sketched in the 'Ideals of Every-day Life,' an extract or two from which we are compelled to postpone. In the first few pages of 'German Literature,' we recognize some attempts at mingled humor and sarcasm, which are melancholy enough; but as the reader advances, he finds the writer engaged in an exposition of the German intellect, which will be found interesting, and new to a large portion of the American public. The fanciful architecture of the 'Snow Storm' is a pretty conceit, well carried out :

Come see the north-wind's masonry.

Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly
On coop or kennel hangs he Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall,
Malgré the farmer's sighs, and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.

And when his hours are numbered, and the world

Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,

Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.'

There are more of the 'Orphic Sayings.' We infer that the editor finds it difficult to shake this writer off; for surely, such a mind as Mr. EMERSON's cannot affect the ambitious common-places which peep out from the cumbrous ornaments that overload their littleness, in all that we have ever seen from the pen of Mr. ALCOTT. Here are three of the 'sayings :'

'BREAD.

'Fools and blind! not bread, but the lack of it is God's high argument. Wouldst enter into life? Beg bread then. In the kingdom of God are love and bread consociated, but in the realm of mammon, bread sojourns with lies, and truth is a starveling. Yet praised be God, he has bread in his exile which mammon knows not of.'

'BAPTISM.

'Except a man be born of water and of spirit, he cannot apprehend eternal life. Sobriety is clarity; sanctity is sight. John baptizes Jesus. Repent, abstain, resolve; thus purify yourself in this laver of regeneration, and become a denizen of the kingdom of God.'

'SILENCE.

'Silence is the initiative to wisdom. Wit is silent, and justifies her children by their reverence of the voiceless oracles of the breast. Inspiration is dumb, a listener to the oracles during her nonage; suddenly she speaks, to mock the emptiness of all speech. Silence is the dialect of heaven; the utterance of gods.'

This second-hand imitator of a second-hand model dresses up meagre thoughts in the 'garb of a mountebank,' to attract the popular wonderment; and like certain small apes of the German, mentioned by a recent London reviewer, seems to consider German

fog a necessary appendage of their profound thinking; 'just as wearing no neckcloth was once thought by London apprentices the best preparation for writing poetry like BYRON'S.' But we waste even contempt upon such inane twattle as these 'Orphic Sayings.' A friend has pencilled an uninspired sample on the margin of one of our 'Dial' pages, which is worth transcribing. Mr. ALCOTT must look to his bays:

'PUTTY.

EVER the true Putty fast-sticketh. Friendship, intertwining with love, evolves its adhesive synonyme in the life actual. In the true window-glass, putty only is potent, pane-sustaining. Flourpaste is derivative, merely. Only the known BADEAU elicits the epidermis-adherence. Plaster is dual. Putty integral. Fluctuations of price embosom Trade. Riz' is the maximum:' 'Won't Stick' the minimum, of quality, evolving the current entity of Price practical.'

'Glimmerings' are not merely glimmerings. has this writer; and he makes his reader think.

Thoughts, pleasant thoughts, yet deep,
Withal, he has a charming fancy, and

a painter's eye. Hear him talk to a bee and a butterfly:

And here come the bee and the butterfly themselves to tell us about it. But, as I said, they obtrude not their precepts upon us. Nay, they seem rather shy than not. And yet these two insects have been, unconsciously to themselves and to man, preachers and parable-bringers since Thought began.'

So come here, thou little citizen of this green republic, and tell us more than the dull books, which prate as if they knew all about thee. We may fling aside Kirby and Spence, now thou art here. Come, leave that clover-blossom awhile, where thou art rolling thyself about and packing away thy nectar ; — cease that monotonous talking to thyself—that hurried merchant-like air: -leave dunning the poor, drooping, insolvent field-flowers, for they will pay thee one day- -come out of the sunshine, thou hot, petulant, systematic little worker, and tell us why thou hast ever been a stirrer of deep thoughts and resolves to the earnest soul! And thou, my lady butterfly- -gay dancer in the breeze, living air-flower-silent ever, but not from thought-making thy demure morning calls on the very flowers at whose doors the disappointed bee has been grumbling; who made thee a proverb and a perpetual homily in the courts of kings-or saw thee flitting along in thy relations of the street or the ball-room? Did some poet invent these correspondences, or stand they not as they have ever stood, written in the double-leaved book of the Most High?

Here are some of the writer's thoughts in verse, and what is more rare, poetry :

There are other papers in the 'Dial' worthy of note, but we must pass them by. Our own estimate of this periodical is so well presented by the Editor of the Boston Quarterly, that we adopt the substance of his remarks: 'It is full of rich thought, though somewhat injured by its puerile conceits and childish expressions. Its authors seem to have caught some partial glimpses and to have felt the moving of a richer, a higher life, which carries them away, and which as yet they have not been able to master. To our taste, they want manliness and practical aims. They are too vague, evanescent, aërial; but nevertheless, there is a sad sincerity about many of them. On many sides they expose themselves to ridicule, but at bottom they seem to have a serious, solemn purpose.' In short, what the London Quarterly Review says of COLE

RIDGE, we may say of the 'Dial' contributors; namely: that 'we are far from thinking them safe or sound writers; but they open an eye of the sleeping intellect of the country, and betoken animation,' and are therefore to stand in some rank of praise. 'The Dial' is published by Messrs. WEEKS, JORDAN AND COMPANY, Boston.

CRAWFORD, THE SCULPTOR.- We have received from this gifted American Sculptor, now pursuing his studies at Rome with that perseverance with which true genius overcomes all obstacles, an engraved copy of his noble statue of ORPHEUS, of which our readers have heard, at length, in the letter of our correspondent, GEORGE W. GREENE, Esq., American Consul at Rome, addressed not long since through these pages to Professor LONGFELLOW. This statue, judging only from the engraving, deserves all the praise awarded to it by Mr. GREENE. The more eminent masters of the art in Italy pronounce the most enthusiastic encomiums upon its extraordinary merits; even THORWALDSEN joins in these hearty tributes to American genius, and has cited CRAWFORD as his successor in the severe classic style of sculpture. We are glad to learn that a copy in marble of the 'Orpheus' is secured for the Boston Athenæum; and we learn that the liberality of New-York is likely to be represented by several opulent and public-spirited private citizens, who have subscribed largely for the same object; so that it will no longer be said that the native city of our artist is tardy in doing justice to his extraordinary genius.

THE 'NEW-YORK REVIEW,' for the January quarter, gives token that in the hands of its industrious and capable editor, Mr. CoGSWELL, it will continue to sustain the high character which is conceded to it throughout the country. Indeed, we remember no number of this Review, which as a whole has impressed us more favorably than the one before us. The first article is upon the Memoirs of the Life of Sir SAMUEL ROMILLY, with a selection from his correspondence;' a work of which we had 'by parcels something heard,' through the English journals. The reviewer has not lost sight of his author in a long dissertation; but supplying each hiatus in his extracts with a brief explanation, has opened to the reader, we doubt not, an ample view of one of the most instructive and delightful books that has been given to the English public in a twelvemonth; a work which records the 'daily beauty' of the life of a great and good man, and which we should be pleased to see speedily republished on this side the Atlantic. The second article, on 'SPENSER'S Poetical Works' having its main theme, we believe, nearly 'by heart,' certainly quite near at heart- we have not yet perused. We were gratified and instructed by the paper which succeeds, upon the 'Doctrine of Temperaments.' It is replete with a great variety of information, interesting and useful to all classes of readers, who have temperaments, and would guard against or remedy the diverse ills which are their several accompaniments. Passing an article upon the 'Geology of the State of New-York,' we come to an able review of a very able and interesting work, which belongs, as did its illustrious subject, to the country, and which we hope to see widely diffused. We shall embrace another occasion to do justice to this 'Life of ALEXANDER HAMILTON,' by his son, JOHN C. HAMILTON, Esq., in these pages; contenting ourselves for the present with quoting and endorsing the opening remarks of the reviewer:

"Next to Washington's, stands the name of Hamilton on the roll of American fame and in its demands on the gratitude of his country. We, at least, have grown gray in that faith, and the events of every succeeding day serve but to confirm our early and unchanged creed. The working of the political institutions of our country, whether for good or evil, has never ceased to indicate a prophetic mind in Hamilton. Even now do we find the vital strength of our union to lie where his far-seeing eye beheld it, and its weaknesses and dangers to arise where he predicted them and labored against them. And if our union has survived past shocks, and is competent to endure yet harder ones, and destined moreover, as we trust, to grow up into enduring greatness, and to become a model to the old