THE VILLAGE CHURCHI—FROM THE NEW PASTORAL. About the chapel door, in easy groups, The briars which wound and trip unheeding feet- Their baneful roots; and to the sun exposed, In small communities a man of mark- There Oukes, the cooper, with rough brawny hand, While Hanson, heavy-browed, with shoulders bent, But soon the approaching parson ends in peace Of silence wavers, settles, falls; and then He knows them well, teaching but what he knows. Or takes false greatness because seen through fogs; Nor leads 'mid brambles of thick argument Till all admire the wit which brings them through: Nor e'er essays, in sermon or in prayer, To share the hearer's thought; nor strives to make The smallest of his congregation lose One glimpse of heaven, to cast it on the priest, Such simple course, in these ambitious times. new, Aims at our faith a blow to fell an ox- "Our hope was planted here-it blooms in heaven!” She walks the azure field, 'mid dews of bliss, While 'mong the thorns our feet still bleed in this!" "This was the fountain, but the sands are dryThe waters have exhaled into the sky!" The listening Shepherd heard a voice forlorn, Such are the various lines; and, while they read, FREDERICK L. COZZENS, THE author of numerous popular sketches in the Knickerbocker and Putnain's Magazines, is a native of New York City. He early became engaged in mercantile life, and is at present a leading winemerchant. In 1853 he published a volume of sketches in prose and verse entitled Prismatics, by Richard Haywarde. It was tastefully illustrated from designs by Elliott, Darley, Kensett, Hicks, and Rossiter. He has since written a series of sketches for Putnam's Monthly, humorously descriptive of a cockney residence in the country, under the title of The Sparrowgrass Papers, which are announced for publication in a volume by Derby. Freda S. Congres С Mr. Cozzens is also the author of a very pleasant miscellany published in connexion with his business, entitled The Wine Press. In addition to inch information on the important topic of the native culture of the grape, it is enlivened by many clever essays and sketches in the range of practical aesthetics. BUNKER HILL; AN OLD-TIME BALLAD, It was a starry night in June; the air was soft and still, When the "minute-men" from Cambridge came, and gathered on the hill: Beneath us lay the sleeping town, around us frowned the fleet, But the pulse of freemen, not of slaves, within our bosoms beat; And every heart rose high with hope, as fearlessly we said, "We will be numbered with the free, or numbered with the dead!" "Bring out the line to mark the trench, and stretch it on the sward!" The trench is marked-the tools are brought-we utter not a word, But stack our guns, then fall to work, with mattock and with spade, A thousand men with sinewy arms, and not a sound is made: So still were we, the stars beneath, that scarce a whisper fell; We heard the red-coat's musket click, and heard him ery, "All's well!" And here and there a twinkling port, reflected on the deep, In many a wavy shadow showed their sullen guns a-leep. Sleep on, thou bloody hireling crew! in careless slumber lie; The trench is growing broad and deep, the breastwork broad and high: No striplings we, but bear the arms that held the French in check, The drum that beat at Louisburg, and thundered in Quebec! And thou, whose promise is deceit, no more thy word we'll trust, Thou butcher GAGE! thy power and thee we'll humble in the dust; Thou and thy tory minister have boasted to thy brood, "The lintels of the faithful shall be sprinkled with our blood!" But though these walls those lintels be, thy zeal is all in vain: A thousand freemen shall rise up for every freeman slain; And when o'er trampled crowns and thrones they raise the mighty shout, This soil their Palestine shall be; their altar this redoubt: See how the morn is breaking! the red is in the sky; The mist is creeping from the stream that floats in silence by; The Lively's hull looms through the fog, and they our works have spied, For the ruddy flash and roundshot part in thunder from her side; And the Falcon and the Cerberus make every bosom thrill, With gun and shell, and drum and bell, and boatswain's whistle shrill; But deep and wider grows the trench, as spade and mattock ply, For we have to cope with fearful odds, and the time is drawing nigh! VOL. II.-45 Up with the pine tree banner! Our gallant PRES COTT Stands Amid the plunging shells and shot, and plants it with his hands; Up with the shout! for PUTNAM comes upon his recking bay, With bloody spur and foamy bit, in haste to join the fray; And POMEROY, with his snow-white hairs, and face all flush and sweat, Unscathed by French and Indian, wears a youthful glory yet. But thou, whose soul is glowing in the summer of thy years, Unvanquishable WARREN, thou (the youngest of thy peers) Wert born, and bred, and shaped, and made to act a patriot's part, And dear to us thy presence is as heart's blood to the heart! Well may ye bark, ye British wolves! with leaders Euch as they, Not one will fail to follow where they choose to lead the way As once before, scarce two months since, we followed on your track, And with our rifles marked the road ye took in going back. Ye slew a sick man in his bed; ye slew with hands accursed, A mother nursing, and her blood fell on the babe she nursed; By their own doors our kinsmen fell and perished in the strife; But as we hold a hireling's cheap, and dear a freeman's life, By Tanner brook, and Lincoln bridge, before the shut of sun, We took the recompense we claimed-a score for every one! Hark! from the town a trumpet! The barges at the wharf Are crowded with the living freight—and now they're pushing off; With clash and glitter, trump and drum, in all its bright array, Behold the splendid sacrifice move slowly o'er the bay! And still and still the barges fill, and still across the deep, Like thunder-clouds along the sky, the hostile transports sweep; And now they're forming at the Point-and now the lines advance: We see beneath the sultry sun their polished bayonets glance; We hear a-near the throbbing drum, the bugle challenge ring; Quick bursts, and loud, the flashing cloud, and rolls from wing to wing; But on the height our bulwark stands, tremendous in its gloom, And so we waited till we saw, at scarce ten rifles' As sullen as a tropic sky, and silent as a tomb. length, The old vindictive Saxon spite, in all its stubborn strength; When sudden, flash on flash, around the jagged rampart burst From every gun the livid light upon the foe accurst: Then quailed a monarch's might before a free-born people's ire; Then drank the sward the veteran's life, where swept the yeoman's fire; And every man hath dropped his gun to clutch a neighbor's hand, As his heart kept praying all the while for Home and Native Land. Thrice on that day we stood the shock of thrice a thousand foes, And thrice that day within our lines the shout of victory rose! And though our swift fire slackened then, and reddening in the skies, We saw, from Charlestown's roofs and walls, the fiamy columns rise; Yet while we had a cartridge left, we still maintained the fight, Nor gained the foe one foot of ground upon that blood-stained height. What though for us no laurels bloom, nor o'er the nameless brave No sculptured trophy, scroll, nor hatch, records a warrior-grave! What though the day to us was lost! Upon that deathless page The everlasting charter stands, for every land and nge! For man hath broke his felon bonds, and cast them in the dust, And claimed his heritage divine, and justified the trust; While through his rifted prison-bars the hues of freedom pour O'er every nation, race, and clime, on every sea and shore, Such glories as the patriarch viewed, when 'mid the darkest skies, He saw above a ruined world the Bow of Promise rise. GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS is a native of Providence, R. I., where he was born in 1824. His grandfather, on the mother's side, was James Barrill, remembered as an eminent Rhode Islander, and for his Senator's speech in Congress on the Missouri Compromise Bill. He died at Washington, and is buried there in the Congressional cemetery. At six years of age young Curtis was placed at school near Boston, and there remained until he was eleven. He returned to Providence, pursuing his studies till he was fifteen, when his father, George Curtis, removed with his family to New York. In a pleasant article in Putnam's Magazine, with the title Sea from Shore, our author has given an imaginative reminiscenco of his early impressions of Providence, then in the decay of its large India trade. Of late years manufactories and machine shops have supplanted the quaint old stores upon many of the docks; but the town, at the head of the Narraghansett bay, is fortunate in its situation, upon a hill at the confluence of two rivers, sloping to the cast, west, and south; and the stately houses of its Putnam's Magazine, July, 1881. The passage is in the author's best funtiful vein, earlier merchants upon the ascent towards the south, form as fine a cluster of residences as are seen in any of our cities. In New York our author was smitten with the love of trade, and deserted his books for a year to serve in a large foreign importing house. Though not without its advantages, the pursuit was abandoned at the end of that time, and the clerk became again a student, continuing with tutors until he was eighteen, when, in a spirit of idyllic enthusiasm, he took part in the Brook Farm Association in West Roxbury, Mass. He remained there a year and a half, enjoying the novel experiences of nature and the friendship of his cultivated associates, and still looks back upon the period as a pleasurable pastoral episode of his life.* From Brook Farin and its agricultural occupations, after a winter in New York, being still enamored of the country, he went to Concord, in Massachusetts, and lived in a farmer's family, working hard upon the farm and taking his share of the usual fortunes of farmers' boys-with a very unusual private accompaniment of his own, in the sense of poetic enjoyment, unless the poet Bloomfield's Farmer's Boy be taken as the standard. At Concord he saw something of Emerson, much of Hawthorne, who had taken up his residence there after the Brook Farm adventure, and a little of Henry Thoreau, and of the poet William Ellery Channing. It was at this time that Emerson tried the formation of a club out of the individual “unclubable" elements of the philosophic personages in the neighborhood, which Mr. Curtis has pleasantly described in the Homes of American Authorst During these years, Mr. Curtis was constantly studying and perfecting himself in the various accomplishments of literature, and after two summers and a winter passed in Concord, he sailed for Europe in August, 1846. He landed at Marseilles, and proceeding along the coast to Genoa, Leghorn, and Florence, passed the winter in Rome in the society of the American artists then resident there, Crawford, Ilicks, Kensett, Cranch, Terry, and Freeman. In the spring he travelled through southern Italy and reached Venice in August. At Milan he met Mr. George S. Hillard and the Rev. Frederic H. Пledge, and crossed the Stelvio with them in the autumn into Germany. There he matriculated at the University of Berlin, and spent a portion of his time in travel, visiting every part of Germany and making the tour of the Danube into Ilungary as far as Pesth. Ile was in Berlin during the revolutionary scenes of March, 1848. The next winter he passed in Paris, was in Switzerland in the summer, and in the following autumn crossed into Italy, and went to Sicily from Naples. He made the tour of the island, and visited Malta and the East, returning to America in the summer of 1850. Some further mention of this peculiar affair will be found in the notice of Hawthorne, In the preface to the Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne calls upon Curtis to become the his torian of the settlement-"Even the brilliant Howadji might find as rich a theme in his youthful reminiscences of Brook Farm, and a more novel one-close at hand as it lles-than those which he has since made so distant a pilgrimage to reek, in Syila and along the current of the Nile." The papers of Mr. Curtis in this volume, published by Putnam in 13, are the sketches of Emerson, Longfellow. Hawthorne, living, Bancroft, and Prescott, Grapesmentis In the autumn of that year he prepared the Nile Notes of an Iowadji, much of which was written, as it stands, upon the Nile. During the winter he was connected with the Tribune newspaper, and the following season the Notes were published by the Harpers and by Bentley in London. In the summer of 1851 a travelling tour furnished letters from the fashionable wateringplaces to the Tribune, and the autumn and winter were spent in Providence, where a second series of Eastern reminiscences and sketches-The IIowoadji in Syria-was written, which was published by the Harpers the next spring, and the same publishing season the Tribune letters were rewritten and printed, with illu-trations by Kensett, in the volume entitled Lotus Eating. Returning to New York in the autumn of 1852, he became one of the original editors of Putnam's Monthly, and wrote the series of satiric sketches of society, the Pot phar Papers, which were collected in a volume in 1853. Besides the Potiphar Papers, he has written numerous articles for Putnam's Magazine, including several poetical essays, in the character of a simpleminded merchant's clerk, with his amiable, common-sense wife Prue for a heroine. Dinner Time, My Chateaux, and Sea from Shore, belong to this series. He has also written for. Harpers' Magazine a picturesque historical paper on Newport,* some tales of fashionable society by Smythe, Jr., and other papers. In the winter of 1853 he took the field as a popular lecturer with success in different parts of the country. In 1854 he delivered a poem before a literary society at Brown University, at Providence. It is understood that Mr. Curtis is at present (1855) engaged upon a life of Mehemet Ali: a topic which will test his diligence and powers in a now department of composition. In the number for August, 1854. UNDER THE PALMS-FROM THE NILE NOTES A motion from the river won, Ridged the smooth level, bearing on My shallop throngh the star-strown calm, I entered, from the clearer light, Humboldt, the only cosmopolitan and a poet, divides the earth by beauties, and celebrates as dearest to him, and first fascinating him to travel, the climate of palms. The palm is the type of the tropics, and when the great Alexander marched triumphing through India, some lindoo, suspecting the sweetest secret of Brama, distilled a wine from the palm, the glorious phantasy of whose intoxication no poet records. I knew a palm-tree upon Capri. It stood in select society of shining fig-leaves and lustrous oleanders; it overhung the balcony, and so looked, far over-leaning, down upon the blue Mediterranean. Through the dream-mists of southern Italian noons, it looked up the broad bay of Naples and saw vague Vesuvius melting away; or at sunset the isles of the Syrens, whereon they singing sat, and wooed Ulysses as he went; or in the full May moonlight the oranges of Sorrento shone across it, great and golden, permanent planets of that delicious dark. And from the Sorrento where Tasso was born, it looked across to pleasant Posylippo, where Virgil is buried, and to stately Ischia. The palm of Capri saw all that was fairest and most famous in the bay of Naples A wandering poet, whom I knew-sang a sweet song to the palm, as he dreamed in the moonlight upon that balcony. But it was only the free-masonry of sympathy. it was only syllabled moonshine. poets. For the pain was a poet too, and all palms are Yet when I asked the bard what the palm-tree sang in its melancholy measures of waving, he told me that not Vesuvius, nor the Syrens, nor Sorrento, nor Tasso, nor Virgil, nor stately Ischia, nor all the broad blue beauty of Naples bay, was the theme of that singing. But partly it sang of a river for ever flowing, and of cloudless skies, and green fields that never faded, and the mournful music of water wheels, and the wild monotony of a tropical lifeand partly of the yellow silence of the Desert, and of drear solitudes inaccessible, and of wandering and lonely men. Then of gardens overhanging rivers, that roll gorgeous-shored through Western fancics of gardens in Bagdad watered by the Euphrates and the Tigris, whereof it was the fringe and darling ornament-of oases in those sere sad deserts where it overfountained fountains, and every leaf was blessed. More than all, of the great Orient universally, where no tree was so abundant, so loved, and so beautiful caravans, May moonlight, my ears were opened, and I heard When I lay under that palm-tree in Capri in the all that the poet had told me of its song. Perhaps it was because I came from Rome, where the holy week comes into the year as Christ entered Jerusalem, over palms. For in the magnificence of St. Peter's, all the pomp of the most pompous of human institutions is on one day charactered by the palm. The Pope borne upon his throne, as is no other monarch,-with wide-waving Flabella attendant, moves, blessing the crowd through the great nave. All the red-legged cardinals follow, each of whose dresses would build a chapel, so costly are they, and the crimson-crowned Greek patriarch with long silken black beard, and the crew of motley which the Roman clergy is, crowded after in shining splendor. No ceremony of imperial Rome had been more imposing, and never witnessed in a temple more im perial. But pope, patriarch, cardinals, bishops, ambassadors, and all the lesser glories, bore palm branches in their hands. Not veritable palm branches, but their imitation in turned yellow wood; and all through Rome that day, the palm branch was waving and hanging. Who could not see its beauty, even in the turned yellow wood? Who did not feel it was a sacred tree as well as romantic! For palm branches were strewn before Jesus as le rode into Jerusalem, and for ever, since, the palm symbolizes peace. Wherever a grove of palms waves in the low moonlight or starlight wind, it is the celestial choir chanting peace on earth, goodwill to men. Therefore is it the foliage of the old religious pictures. Mary sits under a palm, and the saints converse under palms, and the prophets prophesy in their shade, and cherubs float with palms over the Martyr's agony. Nor among pictures is there any more beautiful than Correggio's Flight into Egypt, wherein the golden-haired angels put aside the pain branches, and smile sumily through, upon the lovely Mother and the lovely child. The palm is the chief tree in religious remembrance and religious art. It is the chief tree in romance and poetry. But its sentiment is always Eastern, and it always yearns for the East. In the West it is an exile, and pines in the most sheltered gardens. Among Western growths in the Western air, it is as unsphered as Hafiz in a temperance society. Yet of all Western shores it is happiest in Sicily; for Sicily is only a bit of Africa drifted westward. There is a soft Southern strain in the Sicilian skies, and the palms drink its sunshine like dew. Upon the tropical plain behind Palermo, among the sun-sucking aloes, and the thick, shapeless cactuses, like elephants and rhinoceroses enchanted into foliage, it grows ever gladly. For the aloe is of the East, and the prickly pear, and upon that plain the Saracens have been, and the palm sees the Arabian arch, and the oriental sign-manual stamped upon the land. In the Villa Serra di Falco, within sound of the respers of Palermo, there is a palm beautiful to behold. It is like a Georgian slave in a pacha's harcem. Softly shielded from eager winds, gently throned upon a slope of richest green, fringed with brilliant and fragrant flowers, it stands separate and peculiar in the odorous garden air. Yet it droops and saddens, and bears no fruit. Vain is the exquisite environment of foreign fancies. The poor slave has no choice but life. Care too tender will not suffer it to die. Pride and admiration surround it with the best beauties, and feed it upon the warmest sun. But I heard it sigh as I passed. A wind blow warm from the Enst, and it lifted its arms hopelessly, and when the wind, love-laden with the most subtile sweetness, lingered, loth to fly, the palm stood motionless upon its little green mourd, and the flowers were so fresh and fair-and the leaves of the trees so deeply hued, and the native fruit so golden and glad upon the boughs-that the still warm garden air seemed only the silent, volup tuous sadness of the tree; and had I been a poet my heart would have melted in song for the proud, pining palm. But the palms are not only poets in the West, they are prophets as well. They are like heralds sent forth upon the farthest points to celebrate to the traveller the glories they foreshow. Like spring birds they sing a summer unfading, and climes where Time wears the year as a queen a rosary of diamonds. The mariner, eastward-sailing, hears tidings from the chance palms that hang along the couthern Italian shore. They call out to him across the gleaming calm of a Mediterranean noon, "Thon happy mariner, our souls sail with thee." The first palm undoes the West. The Queen of Sheba and the Princess Shemselnihar look then upon the most Solomon of Howadji's. So far the Orient has come-not in great glory, not handsomely, but as Rome came to Britain in Roman soldiers. The crown of imperial glory glittered yet and only upon the seven hills, but a single ray had penetrated the northern night-and what the golden house of Nero was to a Briton contemplating a Roman soldier, is the East to the Howadji first beholding a palm. At Alexandria you are among them. Do not decry Alexandria ns all Howadji do. To my eyes it was the illuminated initial of the oriental chapter. Certainly it reads like its hendi g-camels, mosques, bazaars, turbans, baths, and clibouques: and the whole East rows out to you, in the turbaned and fluttering-robed rascal who officiates as your pilot and moors you in the shadow of palms under the pacha's garden. Malign Alexandria no more, although you do have your choice of camels or omnibuses to go to your hotel, for when you are there and trying to dine, the wild-eyed Bedoucen who serves you, will send you deep into the desert by masquerading costume and his eager, restless eye, looking as if he would momently spring through the window, and plunge into the desert depths. There Belloueen or Arab servants are like steeds of the sun for carriage horses. They fly, girt with wild fascination, for what will they do next? As you donkey out of Alexandria to Pompey's Pillar, you will pass a beautiful garden of palms, and by sunset nothing is so natural as to see only those trees. Yet the fascination is lasting. The poetry of the first exiles you saw, does not perish in the presence of the nation, for those exiles stood beckoning like angels at the gate of Paradise, eorrowfully ushering you into the glory whence themselves were outcasts for ever:—and as you curiously looked in passing, you could not believe that their song was truth, and that the many would be as beautiful as the one. Thenceforward, in the land of Egypt, palms are perpetual. They are the only foliage of the Nile, for we will not harm the modesty of a few Mimosas and Sycamores by foolish claims. They are the shade of the mud villages, marking their site in the landscape, so that the groups of palms are the number of villages. They fringe the shore and the horizon. The sun sets golden behind them, and birds sit swinging upon their boughs and float glorious among their trunks; on the ground beneath are flowers; the sugar-cane is not harmed by the ghostly shade nor the tobacco, and the yellow flowers of the cotton-1 lant star its dusk at evening. The children play under them, and the old men erone and smoke, the donkeys graze, the surly bison and the conceited camels repose. The old Bible pictures are ceaselessly painted, but with softer, clearer colors than in the venerable book. The palm-grove is always enchanted. If it stretch inland too alluringly, and you run ashore to stand under the bending boughs to share the peace of the doves swinging in the golden twilight, and to make yourself feel more scripturally, at least to surround yourself with sacred emblems, having small other hope of a share in the beauty of holiness-yet you will never reach the grove. You will gain the trees, but it is not the grove you fancied-that golden gloom will never be gained-it is an endless El Dorado gleaming along these shores. The separato columnar trunks ray out in foliage above, but there is no shade of a grove, no privacy of a wood, except, indeed, at sunset, |