Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 011.djvu/77
Let us fly from the deafening sound—
Its thunder shakes the trembling ground:
Midst the terror of the ceaseless din,
Is there no spot to shelter in?
Methinks through the roar so wild and high,
Silver voices in whispers sigh;
And across the foam of that rushing tide
Shadowless forms appear to glide,
There, where the rainbow loves to play
In vanishing hues along the spray,
Their glittering wings the spirits wave,
And beckon us to their watery cave:
They know from the Stranger's land we come,
And they hasten to welcome the Indians home!
M.E.
CHARACTERISTIC EPISTLES.—NO. I.
From the Collection of an Amateur.
Of all the different species of literary composition with which the press of the present day teems, commend us to Letters—in which there should be no such thing as composition at all! And of all letters, give us those alone which never would have been written if the possibility of our perusing them had been contemplated! And of all letter-writers, keep us from any but such as do not know how a letter should be written!
One of the greatest merits of letters, as an invention, is that there is nobody so ignorant or uninformed but he may indite one, and nobody so forlorn or forsaken in condition that he may not hope some day or other to receive one, or remember the day when he did. To "waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole," is far from being the most difficult feat that letters are able to perform. It is said, proverbially, of any attempt to effect an impossible thing, "you might as well try to extract milk from a male tiger!" But letters can do more than this: they can squeeze "the milk of human kindness" from the indurated heart of a miser or a misanthrope—they can "call spirits from the vasty deep" of a metaphysician's brain;—nay more—they can extract amusement from men of business, pleasantry from peers and plenipotentiaries, liveliness from lovers and fine ladies, instruction from fools, humaninty from philosophers, and—the greatest miracle of all—a willingly-paid poll-tax from every body!
The genus, Letters, has been divided, from time to time, into various speices, accoring to the fancy or habits of the party concerning himself about them. But perhaps the best, because the least artificial classification of them, is one which has never yet been amde, and which would arrange them according to the rank and station whitch their writers hold in society. In this view of them they will come under four principal heads; namely, Letters of the poor—of the middle classes—of persons of rank—and of men of genius: which latter must be considered as forming a class by themselves, without any reference to the particular station they may nominally hold. Perhaps, next to the letters of men of genius (of which so much has been already said and written that we must not trust ourselves to add any thing to it here) those of the poor