forth from its hiding-place and restored to the old position. On Sabbath mornings it now rings out its clear silver tones from the belfry of the Dutch Reformed Church in Lafayette Place.

To the many interesting historical localities in New-York, each of them worthy of a pilgrimage, we can scarcely more than refer. We should be happy to go with the reader to the old Walton House, in Pearl-street, the fame of whose splendor once extended to Europe, but which is now mainly used for an emigrant boarding-house, where Citizen Genet, the Minister of France, was married to the daughter of Governor Clinton; to the part of the old Sugar-House still standing near the Post-Office, built in the days of Leisler, and one of the gloomiest of the many prisons for American soldiers during the Revolution; to the site of the old Federal Hall, in whose balcony Washington was inaugurated President of the United States, and to the various places which he made his head-quarters while in the city, not omitting the now splendid Murray Hill, where the worthy Quaker

matron, mother of the grammarian, by her cordial hospitality detained the British generals long enough, on the day of the capture of the city, to enable the American brigade to escape to Harlem; to Richmond-Hill, occupied successively by Washington, Guy Carleton, Lord Dorchester, and Aaron Burr, whom Dr. Hosack found, a few hours after the death of Hamilton, calmly reading the 'Confessions of Rousseau' in his bath, as if totally oblivious of the terrible tragedy that had just shocked the citizens of New-York.

More interesting even than the above, are the Bowling Green and the Commons of earlier times, so intimately associated with the

struggle for American Liberty. On the Bowling Green, in the early history of the city, holidays were celebrated and May-poles erected. There also the British Treaty was burned. In the Kennedy House, now the Washington Hotel, lived Howe and Clinton during the Revolution, and there André commenced his correspondence with Arnold. Just above was the King's Arms Tavern, (now the Atlantic Garden,) the head-quarters of General Gage, and af erward known as the Burns' Coffee-House, the rendezvous of the Sons of Liberty, and where the first important step was taken toward the rebellion of the Colonies.

The Commons, now the City-Hall Park, a mere plot of ground in comparison with the Central Park, (the largest in the world, and of which we give two splendid illustrations,) was the scene of many tumultuous meetings of the Liberty Boys, before the British occupation of the city. It was in these assemblages that Hamilton and Jay, of whom every New-Yorker is justly proud, first made themselves celebrated. It was on the Commons that Leisler suffered an unmerited death. There also stood the old Bridewell, or City Prison. At the north end was the old American Museum; and fronting it the Park Theatre, which long retained the theatrical monopoly of the city.

ROMANTIC ASPECTS OF CALIFORNIA AND INDIA.*

THE old dispute between the respective champions of the classic and the romantic has passed out of court by default. Classicality has entered a nol. con., and has left the field to its younger, intenser, more jubilant, more elastic, and more dishevelled rival. The latest philosophy declares on ultimate and transcendental principles that romance belongs to the essence of Christianity, that it enters into the very lifeblood of modern times, that it is an inherent property of all our civilization and modes of thought, of our loves and hates, our joys and sorrows, of all Christian pathos, aspiration, and intuition, and that a classical spirit and style in our own day is at once an anachronism and a heresy. Our novels, our dramas, our adventures, our habits are all romantic; we live in the focus and fiery furnace of an era of wild literary, scientific, and inventive exuberance; we love extravagant ideas, horrors, and splendor, and apotheosize the greatest absurdity; we throng to cousinly plays that would have driven Sophocles mad, and read novels that Quinctilian would have declared the work of lunacy; in short, we are hopeless romanticists, and we rejoice in it.

Whence is the charm and secret power of romance? In the essential character of Christianity, says many a German philosopher. In the essential character of the Gothic mind, says another school of thinkers. In coffee, tea, and tobacco, says a shrewd physiological inquirer. In the rail-way, steam-ship, and telegraph, says some body enchanted by modern improvements. In the unwhipped and barbarous state of the public mind and social arrangements, says some unconverted pagan. But whatever the cause, the fact of the supremacy of romance in the ideas, sentiments, and literature of our age can hardly be disputed.

Romance is nearly akin to wit, for it implies the conjunction of remote ideas. It is the transfiguration of life, a sort of transcendental being, doing, and suffering. It is the eternal foe of the common-place, yet no one will pronounce it unreal who has felt and reflected how much of what is best in life is shadow and not substance. It is the natural language and the appropriate characteristic of a finite being placed amid the magnificent and evanishing spaces of an infinite universe. A far-reaching quality belongs to every romantic notion, with a sense also of mysterious distances, which the mind attempts in vain to penetrate; of mysterious divine qualities, which the heart struggles

* THE NEW AND THE OLD: or California and India, in Romantic Aspects. By Dr. J. W. PALMER. New-York: RUDD AND CARLETON. 1859.

in vain to take in. Life is real and earthly, but it is also a winged life in a spiritual universe. There is much of human experience, the best statistics of which are found in poems and novels. Romance must always enter largely into all highest moods of thought, but it belongs especially to an age of discovery, invention and momentous transitions, when new ideas are at work, new principles evoked, and new modes of civilization portended but not realized. The electricity fills the air, but the bolt has not yet struck, and the heavens are not yet cleared of the dishevelled and fleeting clouds of venerable tradition. Gravitation, changing, is about to go the other way, and bear with it the whole starry system of society, government, and religion, all the manners and instincts of public and private life. The world's history is but an account of the progress of man through a series of civilizations, as through a zodiac; and who will deny that the wonderful improvements in physical auxiliaries, the strange advances in practicable speculative opinions, which distinguish the period since the great French revolution, mark the slow and steady passage of the race into a new zodiacal sign? In such a time the mind vainly tries to grasp the shadows which flit about it, to foresee the new order which the astrologie heavens are working out. Alive with wild thought which will not be tamed, the author in despair produces from a disordered mind a disordered work - and writes a novel. This may be the secret of the present popularity of novels and romances: they are apropos to the times, the wisest thing we are capable of, a product congenial to every intellectually active age, but most especially to a period when science seems about to utter a new oracle, and Art to rise to a higher standpoint and dictate new laws to her votaries.

A happy illustration of these views of romance is furnished by the 'Romantic Aspects' of Dr. Palmer. Something of a philosopher as well as traveller, it has been his good fortune to see what may be called the two ends of the world, the eastern side of the Orient and the western side of the Occident. Why did he not avail himself of his travels as a text to write out a wise disquisition on the universe? Why did he not recall his scholastic mathematics, and using his birthplace, his home on the Irrawaddi, and his home on the Sacramento as the three sufficient points, draw the full circle of human destiny? Why, indeed, need a man circumnavigate the globe to produce a work which at first glance looks very much like a story-book? Why did he not reduce his experiences to a system, and give us a profound book with a final and finished view of all that need be known about the East and the West?

The answer is, simply that Dr. Palmer lives near the middle of the nineteenth century, when final views, complete expressions of any thing, are as unfashionable as they are impossible. He is a genuine