good and true, that it has always exerted a mighty influence on the world, and that her poets have ever constituted an important part of a nation's glory.

History informs us, that among the Greeks a prisoner always obtained his freedom, who drafted his plea in the language of Euripides. Homer was the glory of Greece. Virgil of Rome. Dante and Tasso of Italy. Corneile and Racine of France. Milton and Shakespeare of England,

while our own

"Land of the forest and the rock,

Of dark blue lakes, and mighty river,
Of mountains reared aloft to mock

The storms career and lightning shock-
Our own green land forever-

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already reckons in her heritage of glory, not a few "immortal names that were not born to die," whose poetry is as sweet as the spring-tide melodies of nature, and admired the world over.

If therefore, this element is a constituent part of our higher nature, and if its legitimate influence is to place us in living connexion with all that is good and beautiful, we infer that instead of neglecting it, we are bound to cultivate it. The perfection of our entire being depends on the symmetrical development of all its faculties, and hence the cultivation of this faculty is essential to the perfection of all the rest.

How may this be effected? It may be cultivated by a careful perusal of good poetry, which is merely the expression of this sympathy, in appropriate language, its embodiment, so to speak, in suitable words. No person can peruse much of the elegant poetry which now constitutes so large a part of our natural literature, without having his imagination chastened, his sympathies quickened and his taste refined. The works entitled "The British Poets," and the "Poets and Poetry of America," abound in splendid productions of gifted minds. In the emanations of such writers, we obtain the noblest conceptions, garlanded with flowers fresh from Parnasus. They cull the richest roses of the ideal world and weaving them in a gorgeous robe, wrap them around their glowing thoughts, and hang them up before the gaze of an admiring world.

THE HUNTERS DREAM.

BY MISS SARAH BURTIS.

A beautiful Indian tradition tells of a young hunter who slept on the prairie; when he awoke an extinguished thunder bolt lay near him with a pair of finely wrought moccasins. He put them on and they bore him to the land of spirits, whence he never returned.

Deep slumber had bound him with fetters strong
For weary
the chase had been and long.
In vision there came a shadowy hand
Beck'ning away to the spirit land;
And voices with echo soft and clear,
Came whispering a spell in his sleeping ear,
Of the joys that await the hunter brave
In bowers that spring by the cloudy wave.
A vision of earth ran through his brain
Of the tall dark forms of the chieftain train:
Whose daring deeds in the chase and fight
Are told by the council-fire at night:
Of a maiden with raven hair, and eye
As dark in their hue as a stormy sky,
But again the spirit voices creep

With their witching spell through his silent sleep.
Sadly yet sweetly they whisper, come

To the land where thy sires have found a home,

Where the red deer bound on the silver sand,
Or sunny glades of that beautiful land,

Softly the spell on the charmed ear breaks
Then dies away; the sleeper wakes,
There close by him lay with fires all spent,
A bolt by the flying manitou sent.

And glittering and bright as with fairy spell
Lay moccasins gay with the tinted shell,

With bead and with stone as clear in their light,
As rain drops that fall when the sun is bright.
He decks his feet in the buskin gay,

And they bear him over the hills away ;
And now he hunts in the spirit land

The deer that bound o'er the silver sand.
The chieftains sit by the council light,
The warriors tell of the chase and fight:
And the maiden with eye of hue so deep
Seeks sadly the darkest shades to weep;
But the sunny-browed youth of her heart no more
Returns from the distant spirit shore.

REMINISCENCES OF REMARKABLE

PERSONS.

BY "

ALTHOUGH the innumerable biographies, sketches, anecdotes and statements regarding most of the individuals mentioned in the following pages, might make it appear that any further attempt to interest the reading public on these subjects were hopeless; still the natural propensity of mankind to Gossip, and the fact that my recollections are those of boyhood, not of an admiring and flattering follower, may induce some interest in them.

SIR WALTER SCOTT.

I never saw the author of Waverly but once, and then under very peculiar circumstances.

When a boy, my parents resided in the ancient border town of Selkirk, within two miles of which stood Abbotsford; which by the way, possesses about the same claims to be a "baronial" residence, as it is usually designated, with Mrs. Warren's pretty cottage on Ida hill. It is in reality a picturesque irregular villa, of moderate size; anything but a castle.

Sir Walter Scott was high sheriff of the county of Selkirk, and very much disliked by the "souters of Selkirk" generally, for his high tory principles,