cepted that challenge, and he has come off victor. Here now is a Bouquet sent from the new world to the old-nothing more-and yet how many hours of thought, and years of toil, were necessary that it might be done. How the chemist sought to unweave the blue robe of air; how the philosopher proved it an ethereal sea, and manned the pumps in its clear depths, and created a vacuum, Nature's old abhorrence. How the miner delved, the furnace glowed, the blacksmith wrought, until that human engine waved round the steamer's wheels with its iron wand. And all this, before that floral gem plucked from the bosom of the New World, all warm and fragrant with her breath, could bloom awhile in the Crystal Palace of the British Isles. Oh! this is a trifle indeed, but it reveals the tide and turn of the battle.

It is wonderful how that hissing, panting, shrieking thing of iron, bears us all, not only away from home, but away from childhood, memory, and yesterday.

The past is left behind, and forgotten, and blushed for; but what of that? The past is dead; 'Let the dead past bury its dead.' Homes are desecrated, deserted, destroyed; but what of that?

humble and old-there are better to come.

They were

Many a

sweet flower of memory and affection is trampled and

crushed beneath the iron heels and hurrying feet of an iron age; but what are flowers, but the fancywork of Nature's holidays? Childhood with its sweet borderings of morning, is stricken from the calendar; but what of that? Childhood, sweet pause, as it is, upon the threshold of life, with its foolish memories of fond mothers and doting fathers, and old songs, and the trees that bore our names, and the rooms where we were cradled, and the cots where we were born, and our little world within the horizon's azure ring: what are these to us? The trees are withered and felled; the roof-tree is mossy, and humble and old; the songs are mute like 'the harp in Tara's halls;' and the mothers, God grant they all are not dead! That 'good time coming' must have been sung, at last, to the brink of being born. What have we to do with trifles such as these? We are men and women, warriors all; we are practical people, wise people, we of this age, in the midst of the battle; we have put away flowers, and fancies, and memories, and the past, with the trinkets-the rattle and the straw that pleased us then-among the idle rubbish of the brain. We are children no more. And we have come out, like the Trojan Prince from

burning Troy, but unlike him, we have left our 'household gods' behind us.

A watch-word is abroad. It has passed from leader to leader, and down and along the rank and file of the world. The world! And what a brigade the world makes! Here is no paltry centurion's command, but nations by battalions, generations by squadrons. How sublimely they are moving! Away on in the van, is

'Bright Improvement on the car of Time.'

I see the Lion of England, and the Lilies of France, and the Stork of old Holland, and the Eagle of Columbia, blazoned upon their banners, and waving in the full noon of the age. One after another, tribes and tongues from under the whole Heaven, have fallen into line. The turbaned Turk has left his ottoman; the islands of the sea, with their gentle children, have taken up the march; the intermitting heart of old Europe, beats a salute, like the sound of a stream in an ancient cave, as the world goes by, and even the drowsy East' has looked out from its windows of sunrise. On they move to the magic of that word 'Progress.' There is no Rubicon, but the Cæsars are not extinct. Scouts boldly plunge into the shadows of the Future, take captive mornings

yet to be, and return with them to the advance guard of this mighty armament, and so it is, that in these days, 'other morns have risen upor mid-noons.'

Close up Close up rings along the nations. I seem to hear it now, as in all languages and lands, the word is speeding on. The sturdy Saxon utters it, and its echo rings like England's morning drum-beat' round the world. The Greek amid his fallen temples, catches and prolongs it; from tongue to tongue, till it swells like a sigh, from the empty, dusty cradle of old Egypt. On moves the column, through the web of years, like the shuttle in the hand of the

weaver.

It was not a trumpet that thus rallied the world, but the shrill whistle of that iron Boatswain, the Steam Engine.

And there it stands, at once the creation and the rival of the hand; that has passed on with its freight of humanity, beyond the uttermost station; that, with soulless sinew, makes Mechanic Man a supernumerary; even he, who laid hands' upon stubborn iron, polished steel and gleaming brass, till, as with touch ethereal,' the metal caught the cunning' of the fingers. The Steam Engine is a monster. He tortures the wave into energy and strength; he breathes out

its shrieking spirit in a cloud, and man, the being with the hand, stands appalled in the presence of the genius he has conjured. Next comes the CALORIC ENGINE, a thing like the other, dug from the mine, and shaped by the altar-light of forges, but no monster-not it; for it presses hard towards humanity's self. It has lungs of iron, indeed, and no delicate leaves of red life; but then it is the calm, blue air WE breathe, that fills its ponderous cylinders; it is nearer human than its panting predecessor, and who shall say, not a more formidable rival?

Winter Nights.

UGH! What a night last night was, to be surethe waltz of the wind and the drifts.

A huge snow-bank of a cloud lay along the west at sunset-an aerial Onalaska-and white, frosty puffs eame out of a clear, blue cleft in the keen north

east.

That wind! Didn't it love snow, and hadn't it queer ways of its own? Now it came from beyond the wood, sighing and sobbing like a penitent. Then