No Room for Two. 'NO ROOM FOR Two!' was the exclamation of some insider, the other morning, as two persons were endeavoring to demonstrate that the capacity of an omnibus has no such property as impenetrability, by crowding into a carriage already having its prescribed six on a side. And so they retreated; bang, went the door, crack, went the whip, and away rolled the omnibus, toward La Porte, leaving the twain to go, emphatically, by private conveyance.' No room for two! An omnibus, all full inside,' is not the only place in the world where there is no room for two. Ambition that, through 'seas incarnadine,' has attained power, can bear no brother near the throne,' for there's no room for two. Avarice, that has grown lean and hungry, as he ministered to the golden god he has set up and worshipped, has no place in his soul for sympathy; with him, there is no room for two. Purpose, whose clear and single eyes descry a signal on the dim outline of the swelling future, and who marches steadily on until he reaches it, says, to all that can divert, distract, delay, 'there is no room for two.' Youthful Love, as she sets up a new presence in the shrine of her heart, 'made in the image of' a creature of dust, and surrounds it with all the offerings of a spirit affluent in generous affections, whispers to herself, as she does so, there's no room for two.' He who has waited and wept during lingering and wearisome years, for the ripening of some blessing, that shall crown his life with a golden harvest at last, takes up the word, when that blessing comes, and exclaims, in the fulness of his heart, 'there's no room for two!' And when we all-as all must-shall, one by one, lie down, we trust to pleasant dreams,' still comes that lonely voice, as eloquent as ever, 'there's no room for two!' As the song has it, in its sweet refrain, "There's nae room for twa, ye ken, There's nae room for twa; "There's nae room for twa, ye ken, There's nae room for twa; The heart that's gie'n to God and Heaven, The Erammar of Life. you 'Long time ago,' some day this month-you and I should remember exactly-a man was born, whose name has been to the juvenile world a household word; sometimes a word of terror, but now, as I remember it, a word to conjure with; to wave up scenes and forms long faded and crumbled. LINDLEY MURRAY! Did you ever hear of him? And do not remember his little book, that like another 'little book,' was bitter,' and never sweet at all? And don't you recollect how firmly it was bound, old Ironsides that it was, and what was on the fly-leaf-John, or James, or David Somebody, 'his book,' and that Lochiel-like couplet : 'Steal not this book, my honest friend, For fear the gallows shall be your end.' And who printed it, H. & E. Phinney,' and the year, 1800 and something! Shut your eyes now, and you can see every page of that old Grammar; just where the noun began, and the 'verb to be,' and Syntax, with its terrible code of twenty-two, exactly twenty-two rules, And how like quarter horses, we plunged through the moods and tenses of the verb 'Love!' Who has forgotten, or who ever can forget, how it went, and we went ? 'I love, loved, have loved, had loved, shall or will love, shall have loved.' On we darted, through the cans, and the coulds, and the mights, of the potential, and the mysterious contingencies of the subjunctive, till we rounded to on the trio of participles that brought up the rear of this marvellous cavalcade of deeds, probable and possible, present, past and future, in the great art and action of loving. And then, when you came to prepositions, how they puzzled you-how they puzzled us all! Don't you remember the definition? Right hand page, four lines from the top, just before conjunctions, on the threshold of Syntax? Thus it ran Prepositions are words used to con nect words, and show the relation between them ;' or, to give little Joe Miller's, or some other little fellow's version, 'Pep'sition word used c'nect words show 'lation 'tween 'em.' Showed 'relation' did they? And what relation? Blood relation or relation by marriage? And so we puzzled and pondered, and passed it over, and learned the list,' that went like a flock of sheep over a wall, 'of, to, for, by, with, in.' And who has forgotten those queer contrivances of conjunctions, that connected and didn't connect; and what a God-send the interjection was, in the midst of the fog, with its oh! ah! and alas! Often had we employed it; we understood, felt, appreciated it. Then the wonderful process they called ' Parsing '— wonder if they do it yet; when we used to take couplets from the prince of English rhyme, and, a row of little cannibals that we were, there we stood, beneath the unwinking optics of our teacher, and "transposed," alias mutilated, " paraphrased," alias butchered, and every thing but devoured, his immortal lines! Do you not recollect how we disposed of "In spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, One truth is clear-whatever is, is right?" After much science and little sense, the light used to burst upon our bedazzled intellects, about once a winter, that Pope meant to say, and did say, "whatever is right, is right!" Do they dream in the grave? Does the bard sleep peaceful yet? And where's the boy that sat next, in the grammar class? And the bright-eyed girl, that used to whisper the answer so softly to us, and save our juvenile palms many an acquaintance with the oaken ferulewhere is she? Does she whisper hope and happiness |