towards the dim north-west. And the Sun is a King, and the Planets are his train. And who knows that these comets are not his couriers, sent out along the great highway-sent out, some of them, before we were born; some of them when time began-returning now and then, with the tidings, The way is clear! Move on! And so he does move sublimely on, in an orbit, a fragment of whose arc, no human intellect has ever grasped.

Wandering they may be, but not lost,' for their routes and times-are they not all recorded in the books of the Admiralty of high Heaven? Then, here's to

The New Craft in the Offing.

'Twas a beautiful night on a beautiful deep,

And the man at the helm had just fallen asleep,

And the watch of the deck, with his head on his breast,
Was beginning to dream that another's it pressed,
When the look-out aloft cried, 'A sail! ho! a sail!'
And the question and answer went rattling like hail:

'A sail! ho! a sail!' 'Where away?' 'No'th-no'th-west!'
'Make her out?' 'No, your honor!' The din drowned the

rest.

There, indeed, is the stranger, the first in these seas,
Yet she drives boldly on, in the teeth of the breeze.
Now her bows to the breakers she steadily turns:
Oh! how brightly the light of her binnacle burns!
Not a signal for SATURN this Rover has given,
No salute for our VENUS, the flag-star of heaven;

Not a rag or a ribbon adorning her spars,

She has saucily sailed by 'the red planet MARS;'
She has doubled,' triumphant, the Cape of the SUN,
And the sentinel stars, without firing a gun!

Now, a flag at the fore and the mizzen unfurled,

She is bearing right gallantly down on the world!

'Helm a-port!' 'Show a light! She will run us aground!' 'Fire a gun!' 'Bring her to!' 'Sail a-hoy! Whither

bound?'

'Avast there! ye lubbers! Leave the rudder alone: "Tis a craft in commission'-the Admiral's own; And she sails with sealed orders, unopened as yet, Though her anchors she weighed before Lucifer set! Ah! she sails by a chart no draughtsman could make, Where each cloud that can trail, and each wave that can

break;

Where each planet is cruising, each star is at rest,
With its anchor 'let go' in the blue of the blest;
Where that sparkling flotilla, the Asteroids, lie,
Where the scarf of red Morning is flung on the sky;
Where the breath of the sparrow is staining the air-
On the chart that she bears, you will find them all there!
Let her pass on in peace to the port whence she came,
With her trackings of fire, and her streamers of flame!

BUT there is a brace of 'coffins' in the candles; the back-stick has fallen to pieces; the frost is creeping up the window-panes; the two hands of the clock are pointing the way to Heaven; the paper has rustled down to my feet; so-GOOD NIGHT!

Riding on a Bail.

THE other day I shot into town, on the Michigan Southern Railway Train. The engine was wellnamed-FLYING CLOUD; for a flying cloud it was, scudding before the magical tempest, through the woods and round the sweeping shores of old Michigan.

And a wonderful thing is that Engine, when we think of it; the emblem and exponent of the hour ; the thing of iron and of fire; with a banner of light and an eye like a star; with sinews of brass and steel; and breathings of flame. It is impatient to go forth to battle. It glides upon those two iron bars, the noblest couplet of the age, from winter to summer; from day to night; from morning to evening.

It gives the river a holiday, and drives on regardless of its flow; it plunges like a strand of thunder through the mountain gorge; it pants around the wide world. Its shafts glitter in the mines; its voice is heard in the shops; its banner is every where. It has forced its way to the far hamlets in the quiet

vales, and they have felt the thrill and the jar of the great world.

Those quiet, little nestling-places where we were born, are fast disappearing. The hill, where the long summer afternoons and we used to lie, and while they gilded the clouds that went floating by, we glorified them-that hill has been graded down, and the cars now thunder along, where breezes swept before.

The grove, where first we learned to build our castles in air, where every mossy tree had a name and a memory, some Vandal hand has felled to feed the hungry Engine.

Sublunary creation goes drifting by at thirty miles an hour, and they are crowding away the past, with its memories and its hallowed spots, its homes, its altars, and its groves, to make room for the future, that comes thundering on by steam.

Japhet passed a life in search of his father; the old world sought a new route to the Indies; modern science is groping 'mid blinding snows and howling winters, for a northwest passage, and by and by, some man, wiser than Zimmerman, will be seeking a place whose echoes were never wakened by the snort of steam; that was never trenched with a canal, nor

webbed with a Telegraph-shall seek, but never find, till that house, the Grave-digger tells of, shall open to receive him.

Here

Iron and Fire are achieving new triumphs, every day, over those twin foes of man, Time and Space. Triumphs? You need not look for them where men are binding broad continents with clampings of iron. You can find them in the veriest trifles. now, they tell us, a bunch of flowers was sent from New-York in an exhausted case, to the World's Fair in London, and after a lapse of three months, were as beautiful as when they bloomed in the Eden of the West. This statement met your eyes; you passed it over, forgot it. But here is the same fact, in another expression Time challenged man to preserve even the flowers unwithered, and from month to month, they had faded and faded, in mockery of human power. It was even deemed a wonder when an American lady in London decked her hair with leaves flushed with the sunset of the year, in the forests of the new World-withered leaves, and nothing more. Space interposed his waste of waters, and said, remove those flowers from their parent stems, and if Time does not wither them at first, yet you shall bear them to their destination, dead flowers at last. Man ac