sonant name of THE GLORY OF MOUNT PLEASANT. thrushes had left the nest in the honeysuckled corner of the gavel-end. Not a single hair in a churn! Then what honey and what jam! The first, not heather, for that is too luscious, especially after such cream, but the pure white virgin honey, like dew shaken from clover, such barley-bannocks, was such honey, on such a day, in such company, and to such palates, too divine to be described by such a pen as that now wielded by such a writer as I, in such a periodical! The jam! It was of gooseberries—the small black hairy ones-gathered to a very minute from the bush, and boiled to a very moment in the pan! A bannock studded with some dozen or two of such grozets was more beautiful than a corresponding expanse of heaven adorned with as many stars. The question, with the gawsy and generous gudewife of Mount Pleasant, was not, "My dear laddie, which will ye hae-hinny or jam ?" but, "Which will ye hae first ?" The honey, I well remember, was in two huge brown jugs, or jars, or crocks; the jam, in half a dozen white cans of more moderate dimensions, from whose mouths a veil of thin transparent paper was withdrawn, while, like a steam of rich distilled perfumes, rose a fruity fragrance that blended with the vernal balminess or the humming Sycamore. There the bees were all at work for next May-day, happy as ever bees were on Hybla itself; and though gone now be the age of gold, happy as Arcadians were we, nor wanted our festal-day or pipe or song; for to the breath of Harry Wilton, the young English boy, the flute gave forth tones almost as liquid sweet as those that flowed from the lips of Mary Morrison, who alone, of all singers in hut or hall that ever drew tears, left nothing for the heart or the imagination to desire in any one of Scotland's ancient melodies. There, under that murmuring shadow, round and round that noble stem, there used on MAY-DAY to be fitted a somewhat fantastic board, all deftly arrayed in home-spun drapery, white as the patches of unmelted snow on the distant moun--and, oh ! over a layer of such butter on tain-head; and on various seats,-stumps, stones, stools, creepies, forms, chairs, armless and with no spine, or high-backed and elbowed, and the carving-work thereof most intricate and allegorical,-took their places, after much formal ceremony of scraping and bowing, blushing and curtseying, old, young, and middle-aged, of high and low degree, till in one moment all were hushed by the minister shutting his eyes, and holding up his hand to ask a blessing. And "well worthy of a grace as lang's a tether," was the MAY-DAY meal spread beneath the shadow of the GLORY OF MOUNT PLEASANT. But the minister uttered only a few fervent sentences and then we all fell to the curds and cream. What smooth, pure, bright burnished beauty on those hornspoons! How apt to the hand the stalk -to the mouth how apt the bowl! Each guest drew closer to his breast the deep broth-plate of delft, rather more than half full of curds, many million times more deliciously desirable even than blancmange, and then filled up to the very brim with a blessed outpouring of creamy richness, that tenaciously descended from an enormous jug, the peculiar expression of whose physiognomy, particularly the nose, I will carry with me to the grave! The dairy at MOUNT PLEASANT Consisted of twenty cows-almost all spring calvers, and of the Ayrshire breed-so you may guess what cream! The spoon could not stand in it—it was not so thick as that, for that is too thick-but the spoon, when placed upright in any depth of it, retained its perpendicularity for a moment, and then, when uncertain towards which side to fall, was grasped by the hand of a delighted and wondering school-boy, and steered with its first fresh and fragrant freight into a mouth already open in astonishment. Never beneath the sun, moon, and stars, were there such oatmeal cakes, pease-scones, and barley. bannocks. as at MOUNT PLEASANT. You could have eaten away at them with pleasure, even although not hungry-and yet it was impossible of them to eat too much manna that they were!! Seldom -seldom ir deed-is butter yellow on May-day. But the butter of the gude wife of Mount Pleasant--such, and so rich was the old lea-pasture—was cooured like the crocus, before the young Blackwood's Magazine. ODE FOR MUSIC. O CAME ye by Dee's winding waters, And down by the dark Loch-na-Gaur? Was heard a wild song of despair, The Iff, like a bay'd deer, was quaking As pour'd this dread strain from the brae. Chorus of Demons. Sound! sound Your anthem profound, Spirits of peril, unawed and unbound! Clamour away, To mortals' dismay, Till the Christian turn on his pillow to pray. Sound, Sound, &c Wake up your pipe and your carol with speed, The pipe of the storm, and the dance of the dead: Light up your torches. the dark heavens under, he torch of the lightning, and bass of the thunder ! Roar it and revel it, riot and rumble, Till earth from her inmost core grovel and grumble: And then in deep horrors her moody front swaddle, Till all these dark mountains shall rock like a cradle ! Sound, sound, &c. For he, the greatest of earthly name, Your anthem profound, Spirits of peril, unawed and unbound! Your symphony dread, Till shudders the dust of the sleeping dead. Chorus of Angels. Hail, Hail, With harp and with vaile, Yon spirit that comes on the gloaming gale! Sing! sing! Till heaven's arch ring, To hail the favour'd of our King. Gray shade of Selma, where art thou sailing? Light from thy dim cloud, and cease thy bewail ing: Though the greatest of all the choral throng With songs that pertain to the land of the blest! And earth roll in fire, Ere perish the strains of his sovereign lyre. That spirit of flame that had its birth In heaven, to blaze for a moment on earth, Mid tempest and tumult, mid fervour and flame Ye spirits of blame, Away to your revels in thunder and flame; For ours the avail, To hallow and hail Yon spirit that comes on the gloaming gale. Then bounding through the fields of air, That seem'd from the arch of the rainbow won, A hum of melody far was shed, And return its harp to heaven again. Let's hail the name Close by-oh, we must show it you, Sir Francis, A wild, rude copse-road, winds, beneath the light Is that; with such a sense of freshness round us, Winds, till beneath a beech, whose slender stem Of richest meadow land, which creeps half up Half full of rank and creeping plants, with briars And pendant roots of trees half cover'd o'er, Of nature and of man. The circling woods Dramatic Scenes, Sonnets, and other Poems. Miscellanies. A SHIRT. I ASK'D a lady-not a flirt, PULPIT HOUR-GLASSES. (For the Mirror.) HOUR-GLASSES, for the purpose of limiting the length of a sermon, were coeval with the Reformation, as appears from the frontispiece prefixed to the Holy Bible of the bishops translation, imprinted by John Day, 1569, 4to. In the frontis piece, Archbishop Parker is represented with an hour-glass standing on his right hand. Clocks and watches then being but rarely in use, it was thought fit to prescribe the length of the sermons of the reformists to the time of an hour, i. e. the run of an hour-glass. This practice became generally prevalent, and continued to the time of the Revolution in 1688; the hour-glass was placed either on the side of a pulpit, or on a stand in front of it "One whole houre-glasse," 66 one halfhoure-glasse," occur in an inventory taken about 1632, of the goods and implements belonging to the church of All Saints, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. - Vide Brand's History of Newcastle, vol. ii. p. 370, notes. Butler, in his Hudibras, thus alludes to these hour-glasses : "As gifted brethren preaching by A carnal hour-glass do imply." In some churches of the metropolis, these relics of our ancestors' patience and piety remain till this day. In the church of St. Alban, Wood-street, London, on the right hand of the reading-desk, is a spiral column, on the top an enclosed square compartment with small twisted columns, arches, &c., all of brass, in which is an hour-glass in a frame of a long square form; the four sides are alike, richly ornamented with pillars, angels sounding trumpets, &c. Both ends terminate with a line of crosses, pattée, and fleur-de-lis, somewhat resembling the circle of the crown, all in raised work of brass.* In the churchwardens' accounts of the parish of St. Helen, Abingdon, Berkshire, 1591, is an article, "Payde for an houreglasse for the pulpitt, fourepence." An hour-glass frame of iron remained fixed in the wall, by the side of the pulpit, in 1797, in the church of North Moor, Oxfordshire; and the frame of one in St. Dunstan's church, Fleet-street, which was of massive silver, was but a few years since melted down, and made into two staff-heads for the parish beadles. Hour-glasses were made use of by the preachers in the days of Cromwell, who, on their first getting into the pulpit and naming the text, turned up the glass, and if the sermon did not last till the glass was out, it was said by the congregation that the preacher was lazy; and, if he continued to preach much longer, they would yawn and stretch, and by these signs signify to the preacher that they began to be weary of his discourse, and wanted to be dismissed. titled, "England's Shame; or a Relation In the frontispiece of a small book, enof the Life and Death of Hugh Peters, by Dr. W. Young," Lond. 1663, Hugh Peters is represented preaching, and holdan hour-glass in his left hand, in the act lows, so let's have another glass.' of saying, "I know you are good fel The use of the hour-glass furnished Daniel Burgess, the celebrated nonconformist preacher at the beginning of the last century, with a humorous expression, similar to the above. In a discourse which he once delivered at the conventicle in Russell-court against drunkenness, some of his hearers began to yawn at the end of the second glass; but Daniel was not to be silenced by a yawn; he turned his voice, desired they would be patient his hour-glass, and altering the tone of awhile longer, for he had much more to * Gentleman's Magazine, August, 1826 say upon the sin of drunkenness; "therefore, addled he, " my friends and brethren, we will have another glass-and then !"* G. SMEETON. NOTHING! THE following letter was recently sent to a young lady at school, by her brother. My dear Sister, I am sorry to inform you that I have nothing to say, nothing at all. I can think of nothing, say nothing, write nothing. Pray what is nothing? Is it something or nothing. Why, nothing is nothing. Nothing is clearer than that. How do we know whether nothing is clear or muddy. But I will show that nothing is something, and therefore cannot be nothing. Nothing is a cypher, and a cypher is something, therefore nothing is something. I say nothing is a cypher. Take care you do not stand like a cypher, if you do you will stand like nothing, for nothing is a cypher. But farther, nothing is not only someHolloa! thing but something besides. you little rogue, what are you doing there ? "Nothing, Sir, nothing I assure ye." The boy was breaking windows. Here breaking windows was nothing; so that nothing is something besides. Again, nothing is any thing. For nothing is a cypher, and nothing is something besides. Suppose an apple. But nothing is something besides. Say a Spanish Inquisition; but nothing is still something besides, if you specify every particular you are capable of specifying. So that nothing is any thing. In the next place we shall demonstrate that nothing is every thing, for if nothing be any thing, it must be every thing.Having, I hope, satisfactorily proved to any well disposed mind, such I know your's to be, that nothing is something, any thing, and every thing, I proceed, lastly, to show that every thing is nothing. For if a simpleton be a goose, a goose is a simpleton; if a dame be a lady, a lady is a dame. Nothing plainer; and in like manner, if nothing be every thing, it follows, obviously, that every thing is nothing. You see, my dear J. I take up my pen at the present opportunity to inform you and give you all the news I have been enabled to collect about London, its architecture, arts, civilization, commerce, &c. for inasmuch as I have said nothing about them, in so much have I said every thing. But I was afraid you would say there was nothing in my letter. I shall therefore conclude with hoping that your application and * Hogarth Illustrated, vol. i. p. 110. The THE TALLIPOT TREE. A LEAF of this extraordinary tree has lately been brought over from the island of Ceylon, of which place it is a native, and is now in the possession of the Rev. Richard Fletcher, of Hampstead. leaf is in a good state of preservation; it measures fully eleven feet in height, sixteen feet across its widest spread, and from thirty-eight to forty feet in circumference. If expanded as a canopy, it is sufficient to defend a dinner party of six from the rays of the sun, and in Ceylon is carried about by the natives for that purpose. THE BEEJAPOOR GUN. THIS great cannon is called Mullik-iMydan, or "Sovereign of the Plain;" but the natives of Beejapoor insist on the Plain." Its muzzle is four feet eight calling it Moolk-i-Mydan, or "Lion of inches in diameter; the calibre two feet four inches. It was cast at Ahmednuggur, A. D. 1549, by a native of Constantinople, named Hoosein-khan. Aurungzebe put an inscription upon it to commemorate the conquest of Beejapoor in 1685, which has led to the mistake of supposing it to have been cast at that time. It is alike curious from its dimensions and its history. The Bombay Government, in 1823, was particularly desirous of sending it to the king of England, and an engineer was sent to examine it for the purpose; but the present state of the roads renders the difficulty of transporting such a large mass of metal to the coast almost insuperable.-Duff's Mahrattas. FOLLY OF IDOLATRY. TERAH, the father of Abraham, says tradition, was not only an idolator but manufacturer of idols, which he used to expose for public sale. Being obliged to go out one day upon particular business, he desired Abraham to superintend for him; Abraham obeyed reluctantly. "What is the price of that god ?" asked an old man who had just entered the place of sale, pointing to an idol to which he took a fancy. "Old man," said Abraham, "may I be permitted to ask thine age ?""Three-score years," replied the age-stricken idolator. "Three score years!" exclaimed Abraham, "and then thou wouldst worship a thing that nas been fashioned by the hands of my father's slaves within the last twentyfour hours! Strange that a man of sixty should be willing to bow down his grey head to a creature of a day !" The man was overwhelmed with shame, and went away. After this there came a sedate and grave matron, carrying in her hand a large dish with flour. "Here," said she, "have I brought an offering to the gods; place it before them, Abraham, and bid them be propitious to me."-" Place it before them thyself, foolish woman," said Abraham, "thou wilt soon see how greedily they will devour it." She did so. In the meantime, Abraham took a hammer, broke the idols in pieces, all excepting the largest, in whose hands he placed the instrument of destruction. Terah returned, and with the utmost surprise and consternation, beheld the havoc amongst his favourite gods. "What is all this, Abraham? what profane wretch has dared to use our gods in this manner?" exclaimed the infatuated and indignant Terah. "Why should I conceal anything from my father ?" replied the pious son. "During thine absence there came a woman with yonder offerings for the gods; she placed it before them. The younger gods who, as well may be supposed, had not tasted food for a long time, greedily stretched forth their hands and began to eat before the old god had given them permission. Enraged at their boldness, he rose, took the hammer, and punished them for their want of respect !" Medrash Bereshith Rabah. THE following is a list of square miles of the United States: In Vermont, 10,237; New Hampshire, 9,491; Maine, about 40,000; Massachusetts is 6,250; Rhode Island, about 1,580; Connecticut, 4,674; New York, 45,000; New Jersey, 8,320; Pennsylvania, 46,800; Delaware, 2,120; Virginia, 70,000; North Carolina, 48,000; South Carolina, 24,080; Georgia, 62,000; Kentucky, 50,000; Tennessee, length 480 miles, breadth, 400; Ohio, 39,128. The states of Louisiana, Indiana, Illinois, and Alabama, the number of square miles of each not ascertained. There are twenty-two States in the Union, each of which has a Legislature, which makes all the laws necessary for the government of each State distinct from that of the United States. THE OHIO STATE. THIS portion of the United States of North America affords one of the most striking instances of increase in population and wealth Only thirty years ago a desert, which scarcely knew the step of civilized man, it has already risen to the third rank in the order of the Union, and before this decade has passed away, will present 1,000,000 active and happy inhabitants. Five years ago this state counted 581,434 inhabitants, and at the present time 850,000, an increase which surpasses all previous experience. Ohio sends 16 representatives and senators to the General Congress at Washington; and 72 representatives, with 36 senators, form the internal state, or the domestic legislature. Four upper and nine departmental judges administer the law; and a militia, consisting of cavalry, infantry, yeomen, &c. can station 150,000 men for the defence of the country. For this view, the state is divided into 14 divisions and 48 brigades, under the command respectively of the same number of generals. In the past year there were actually enrolled in the State-office 99,997 infantry, 3,292 cavalry, and 1,530 artillery, making a total of 104,819 mer.. A small part of these receive their arms from the armories of the United States; the rest furnish themselves at their own expense. In the register of arms there appear 36,356 muskets, 2,131 pistols, 3,786 daggers and swords, 6 36-pounders, and 2 4-pounders. Yet all the trade of Ohio has flowed through the sister states, and this state has, properly speaking, no foreign commerce; its exports to the other parts of the Union consist of corn, meal, horned cattle, horses, tobacco, &c., its in-trade of the products of the southern states. Trade is increasing at an extraordinary rate, and on the completion of the canals even this rate must be accelerated. The first of the Ohio canals is 306 miles long, and runs frsm Portsmouth on the Ohio to Alveland in lake Erie. The second canal, 68 miles long, runs in the direction of Dayton to Cincinnati. From 5,000 to 6,000 labourers are constantly at work on them. In 1828, three-fourths of the canals will be completed; and in 1830, the work be entirely finished. The principal navigation is on Lake Erie and the Ohio river. The chief harbours on the former are Put-in-Bay, Manmee-Bay, the towns of Sandusky, Cleveland, Fairpot, and Ashtabula. During the year 1825, 286 ships and steam-vessels put into Sandusky-Bay alone. Between 40 and 50 schooners and 4 steam-vessels constantly trade on Lake Erie. The culti vation of the land is advancing with like rapidity, and is peculiarly promoted by the level character of the country. 504 post-houses carry on the quick interchange of letters. |