tem.

For the near moon, wings of a particular construction would suffice, just as a person takes a walk when he does not desire the trouble of ordering his carriage.

Alfric's next labour was a light one. It was simply to invent a uni. versal language to be used in this intercourse, when it should be car. ried fully into operation. It was not altogether intelligible to the Europeans to whom it was explained; but it was obvious that on its principles it must be so to the population of the greater planets, though perhaps a little obscure to the speakers of patois in Ceres, Juno, Pallas, and other fragmentary stellar bodies.

With regard to the earth itself, Alfric's learning was immeasurable. Crosse might galvanize icarides out of pebbles, and the German doctors detect other kinds in metals; but these are the triflings of ignoramuses. The entire globe is composed of living and animated beings. There is no such thing in creation as inorganic matter. A common granite paving stone is composed of millions of creatures, from the age of three thousand to the age of three hundred thousand years. Water is truly a confluence of globular naiads and other nymphs of a thousand shapes; trees are substantially dryads, hamadryads, &c.; herbs and grasses, of creatures vulgarly called fairies. Metals are but combinations of gnomes; the air, of spirits; the centre, of sensitive essences; and what is strange, lava is nothing else than a union of salamanders and angelic partners, whom the fire has purified far above the most subtle atoms-the grosser earth and most ethereal existences of the finer circumambient fluid.

The world, he showed, was informed by one soul, which soul con. sisted of caloric, was communicated by sparks or shocks, and divisible into an eternity of parts and members. The nearest approach to death, or non-entity, was in cold; but neither could be absolute. At the period he arrived at these conclusions, his amiable lady was confined, and presented him with a particle of calorific soul in the frame of an infant female. To Alfric it was quite indifferent whether it were girl or boy; for at this time his mind was expanding with many amazing improvements in the most abstruse and conjectural sciences which oc cupied the learned and the foolish. He had come to the conclusion, that as Heat was Life, children might be hatched as well as chickens, and all the pains and penaltics attached to the curse upon the race avoided. He would beat the Escaleobion all to nothing, inasmuch as soul-ar heat was superior to artificial.

In the photogenic art, no longer photogenic, he produced the loveliest and most accurate panoramas with rush-lights; and not only portraits, but busts, statues, and groups of moving figures, not inferior to actual life, by means of a camera obscura, modelled upon a Daguer. rotype notion, and illuminated by the phosphoric sheen of a single glow-worm. The most remarkable result, however, which accrued from these experiments was the discovery that shadows were real beings, not less substantial than the men and women they had been supposed to copy. In their natures they differed from the originals, having a capability of elongating or shortening themselves in an extraordinary degree, but still preserving identity, occupying space, and acting upon internal as well as external impulses. By the same rule, the reflections of objects in mirrors, or other diaphonous media, were demonstrated to be rather more substantive than the objects reflected.

In all other wondrous questions which vexed mankind, Alfric was equally ahead, and panting Time limped and toiled after him in vain. But it would detain us too long to go into the details of his unparal. leled career, and we must proceed to the prodigy which wrought his ruin.

As if Gall, Spurzheim, Combe, Mesmer, and Dr. Elliotson, had all died, and left him the legacy of their wits, he went out of all calcula. tion farther into phrenology and magnetism than all who had gone be. fore. Holding that the outward shape of the skull was not so certain an index and test of the human faculties and passions within as the brain itself must be, which formed that covering, and in which these passions resided, he determined on appealing to the internal evidence. Thus, by removing a portion of the bone, he investigated the medullary substance, for the satisfaction of his doubts; and, stupendous as were his preceding acquisitions of knowledge, it was here that he surpassed them all. By throwing an intense Bude light upon the open brain, he perceived that every particle was a separate soul, but yet that the whole was only one soul; the atomic theory distinct, but indissoluble. He proceeded to subject the lobes, anterior and posterior, to magnetic influence, and, after about twenty passes, what was his consternation to behold this soul gather up its plumage as a bird shakes its feathers, and spreads its wings for flight, and leave its abode a mere caput mortuum. His dread that it might never return was, however, soon dispelled; for, by reversing the process, and making the passes from left to right, instead of from right to left, as before, the soul which had left came back, and all was right again. Having subsequently thrown the patient into a profound sleep, Alfric interrogated the re-placed soul; and, in answer to his inquiries, was informed, that when it quitted its fatty, membraneous prison, it possessed the power of ascertaining the company of and convers. ing with pre-Adamite angels; the younger angels, who, before the deluge, intermarried with the children of men, the souls of defunct mortals, and a thousand other disembodied essences, of which human. ity, in its corporeal form, had never entertained, or could entertain, a conception.

What a new and glorious vision was here unfolded for speculation! How dim, how worthless was every other pursuit, compared with this spacious and immortal field! Earth, moon, sun, planets, milky way vanished, and the immaterial superseded the material world!

Almost mad with the immensity of the design, in an evil hour did Alfric declare these superhuman phenomena to his wife; and out of his unbounded love for their cherub offspring, propose to send her soul on an expedition to the unknown realms of unseen beings. The mother decidedly objected, and it was in vain that he demonstrated the ease with which their infant daughter's brain could be exposed through the unclosed sutures; how, by merely dissecting a few inches of skin, the soul's gates would be opened; and how sure it was, that, by reversing the magnetic passes, it would be restored to its seat, like a dove to its nest. Philosophers and women are equally obstinate and sorry are we to record, that on this theme there was no reconciling the cpinions of the family of Athelwerd. Unfortu nately for its head, he persevered too much, and the consequences took him by surprise. His terrified lady had secretly consulted her

parents, and her parents had laid the particulars of the case before several gentlemen, eminent for their skill as physicians, though, as our readers are aware, ten thousand such piginies as they were could not have made one giant of the intellect of Athelwerd. That gifted individual was seated in his study, revolving on the possibility of despatching his own scul on a mission of inquiry, when it was entered by a person, with whom he had not the honour to be personally acquainted, in a very clean dress, and a very nicely powdered wig, and attended by several other persons, neither so sprucely dressed nor at all powdered. The first-mentioned individual solicited very kindly and tenderly to be instructed as to the state of his health; and, though assured in the most satisfactory manner that he was perfectly well, did not appear to be convinced of the truth of this averment. He consequently ventured to press the conversation in a style which Alfric deemed to be as impertinent as his intrusion; and forgetting his philosophy, he ordered him in a tone of rage to be gone, if he wished to avoid the gravitation experiment of an aërial descent from the window, which, be it remembered, was in the eastern turret of the ancient baronial mansion of the Athelwerds, and three stories high. The termination may be told in a few words. Instead of retiring, the doctor advanced, and Alfric rushed towards him in fury to put his threat into execution. He was instantly seized by his myrmidons, pinioned, and conveyed to an apartment strongly secured and strictly guarded.

The suspicion of the truth now darted across his mind, and from the violence of resistance he resolved to recover his calmness and rationality, so as to end the detestable and idiotic farce. But such resolves do not always produce the desired effects; and, like the mad dog in the adage, to be once charged with insanity is so indubitable a presumption of the fact, that it is next to impossible to persuade any one to believe the contrary. If you are angry, it is furiousness; if you are quiet, it is sulkiness; if you are silent, you are morbid; and if you speak, you are misinterpreted; and if this be sooth in ordinary cases, what must it have been in the case of a person like Alfric Athelwerd? The anxieties he had suffered for his country had caused him to look pale and care-worn. He had from his very youth been esteemed by all to be eccentric and visionary. The mighty extent of his knowledge sealed his doom.

At the ensuing inquest, de lunatico inquirendo, it was of no avail that he referred to his abortive attempt to preserve the British fleet from destruction, to his suggestions for the prevention of the famine, and to the fatal consequences of inattention to his prophecies and plans on these and many other occasions. It was of no avail that he called upon the jury to look back for only fifty years, and see what had been achieved by railroads, by steam, by mechanics, by chemistry, by mesmerism-and thence give him credit for improvements, inventions, and discoveries that would be made within the next fifty or a hundred years; it was of no avail that he offered to demonstrate to the learned physicians that the brain-pan comprised fifty millions of atomic souls. combined as One telluric life, and capable of being dismissed from its cerebral dwelling on a voyage to the immaterial world; that it must be forced to re-inhabit its mansion by manipulations of a peculiar kind, the material hand of the exorciser having power over the flight and residence of the "wandering soul." It was of no avail

that he proved the judge, the jury, the witnesses, and the doctors to be insane, according to the true definition and meaning of the word; and that he alone possessed the maximum of reason suited to the functions of an intelligent being,-in the scale of creation only a little lower than the angels. All was of no avail; and while he argued of the Mesmeric Crisis, the jury unauimously made up their minds to the verdict of" Insanity, since the 1st of April, 18-," and he was consigned to the charge of Dr. in whose private asylum he remains at this day,-a woful example of the danger of being wiser than the generation in which he lived, to be declared, instead of "The Happy Man," a Monomaniac!!!

ELEGIAC TRIBUTE TO THE MEMORY OF
THOMAS HAYNES BAYLY, ESQ.

BY MRS. C. BARON WILSON.

FAREWELL to thee, sweet melodist! thy minstrel-lay is o'er,
Thy lyric harp shall tune its strings to music's voice no more;

But like the rose-leaves, when they fall, though scatter'd on the ground,
The sweetness of the poet's song still breathes a fragrance round:
And thus thy minstrel memory is still embalm'd by death,
And holds a spell o'er feeling hearts, that flects not with the breath.

Oft in the gay and crowded scene, where Pleasure's votaries meet,
Thy songs from woman's syren voice shall flow in accents sweet;
Oft shall the listening lover steal, from music's tuneful strings,
A hope that she who breathes the strain may feel the words she sings :
And though beneath the willow's shade thy broken lute is hung,
In memory still is treasured deep the strains that lute has sung.

I well remember when thy lute first woke its dulcet lay

In years long past, when life for me was one bright summer day;
Thy songs are twined with memories I never can forget,
That 'mid the withered waste of life my heart keeps verdant yet:
And when I think the hand is cold, those tuneful chords that pressed,
Mine eye a pensive tear will dim, a sigh escape my breast.

Alas! each hour but shows me more the poet's fatal doom
Writ in Misfortune's clouded page; though radiance may illume
The chequer'd path he treads awhile, Sorrow and cankering Care,
Coiled like the worm within the bud, are ever hidden there!
And such a fate, alas! was thine, oh! sweetly gifted Bard,
And such will be to thousands more, the Child of Song's reward!

A flame too delicate for earth, his spirit feels the chill

Of worldly woes with keener sense, and a more sickening thrill;

He cannot wrestle with the throng, or struggle mid the crowd
Like other minds, but sinks o'erpowered, his strength too quickly bow'd :
And many a wasted frame can show, and broken spirits tell,
How sad a doom is his who owns the Poct's gifted spell!

Farewell and may the verdant turf lie lightly on thy breast,
And flowerets blossom from the sod where thy cold ashes rest;
May Pity's tear bedew the spot, and lovers' accents breathe
A fond regret for him who sleeps, that flowery turf beneath :
And many a kindred spirit come, in spring's returning bloom,
To hang a wreath of tribute-flowers upon the Poet's Tomb!

TALES AND LEGENDS OF THE ISLE OF WIGHT.

WITH THE ADVENTURES OF THE AUTHOR IN SEARCH OF THEM.

BY ABRAHAM ELDER, ESQ.

UPON our arrival at Ryde, we took up our quarters at Yelf's hotel. A mutton-chop, and a glass of hot brandy-and-water each after dinner. At length the antiquary remarked,

"I know you are a great admirer of Shakspeare. It is very odd that the Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, of his Midsummer Night's Dream, who appears to have been a very popular spirit at that time, should now be scarcely known to the world, except through the medium of that play. The Isle of Wight, indeed, is the only spot that I am aware of where there remain any traces of his existence. There are two places here that are still called after him, Puckpool and Puckaster."

"Any traditions relating to them?"

"There are," was the reply. "The evening is delightful," continued he, "and Puckpool is close at hand,-what say you to a walk there before tea, and I will tell you a story about it as we go along."

After a walk of about a mile and a quarter, we got to Puckpool. It was a low marshy flat, close to the sea. The antiquary began as follows: "At the date of the following story, this spot is described as having been a kind of salt marsh, entirely overflowed by the sea at high spring-tides. In ordinary tides, there was left a bare green meadow, covered by the peculiar race of plants that will bear contact with salt water. The sea, however, had eaten its way through it in numerous directions, forming narrow channels, deep holes, and here and there wide spaces were scooped out, which were filled by the tide at high water, leaving numerous islands and promontories around. It was the largest of these pools, with a round green island in the middle, that gave the name to the place.

"People used to come from far and near to visit this spot; not, however, on account of any particular beauty it possessed, but from the number of wonderful tales that had been told about it. Robin Goodfellow, or Puck, with a troop of mischievous and frolicsome fairies, made it their favourite place of nocturnal meeting. Numerous were the pranks that they played. A tidy housemaid sometimes, upon getting up in the morning to her work, would find everything swept, and brushed, and scoured, and the floor nicely sanded, upon which the prints of little feet could be faintly traced, and the brooms and brushes and dusters carefully put back into their places. If she was particularly industrious, it is said that she actually sometimes found a piece of money in her shoe. But the slovenly girl was punished with cramps, teased with chilblains, and was occasionally frightened to death by the rats running across her nose when she was in bed. The consequence was, that the neighbourhood of Puckpool used to be celebrated for tidy housemaids and steady servants.

"Those who were in favour with the fairies were continually meeting with good luck, and those they took a dislike to were as