Persevere in that manner. well! Who are you?"

Well! remember Monday morning. Fare

This was addressed to a poorly-clad woman, who now stood before him, and whose pallid cheeks and suffused eyes betrayed deep grief. At this nearly harsh address of the merchant, she looked anxiously up, and answered: "I am the wife of Bodmer, the man who was so unfortunate as to fall from the loft and break his leg."

"Shocking! very shocking! I am very sorry for Bodmer; he was a steady man, and ever cheerfully performed his duties. But my surgeon visited him; what did he say?"

"He gives the best hope of saving my husband's life, but it will be a tedious sickness; and who knows if the poor man will ever again be able to work? What, then, shall we, with our five poor children, do ?"

"Have confidence in the man in whose service you have met the misfortune," answered the merchant. "What the patient needs of wine and strengthening food, shall be furnished from my kitchen. The weekly wages you will receive regularly on Saturday. Now go home, and remember me to your husband, whom I will soon visit."

The woman through her tears rendered speechless thanks, and the merchant began reading my letter.

"Your letter has rather an old date," said he, suddenly; "I have long expected it. Your circumscribed time has probably prevented an earlier call ?"

I stammered out a lie, something about my indisposition to disturb so active a business man, but that at the moment I was in great necessity. He did not let me finish, but went on.

"You are here highly recommended to me. If I can do anything for you, speak freely. Persons away from home, frequently stand in need of aid."

This was the moment to speak of the deep ebb of my purse; but oh! the false shame-the words would not leave my lips.

"Nothing?" he proceeded. "Well, on another occasion, perhaps. Come, however, on Sunday to my cottage before the Damn Door, and take a spoonful of soup with me. Men of business have on week-days

but small leisure to bestow on mere conversation."

Here was my dismissal; but without money, however, I could not go. I was completely cleaned out, and must travel. At this moment there came to my rescue a clerk, who handed between the desk and myself a letter brought by an express, addressed to Mr. Mohrfeld. It was instantly opened and read, and was probably of a favorable nature, as a pleasing smile played round the lips of the merchant; but suddenly, as if betraying a weakness, it again vanished, and he laid the letter with accustomed unconcern on one side. As he did so, his glance again fell

on me.

"Anything further to command, sir?"

Now must I speak, cost what it will. I stepped close to his chair, bowed my lips to his ear, and poured forth a multitude of words, among which the most emphatic were, "want of money.' To an elegant construction of sentences at such a moment, would even Demosthenes have given no thought. The merchant stared at me with wondering eyes, then took my letter in hand and again read it through with close attention; after which, he wrote a line under it and handed it to me, saying, "Here,

sir, have the goodness to hand this to my cashier. I shall depend on seeing you at my table on Sunday; for the present you will excuse me." I bowed silently, and soon stood before the man surrounded with iron chests. He took the letter, and said, "You have to receive one hundred marks courrant. Will you please give a receipt? Here is the money." "And here, sir, is your receipt," cried I with a lightened heart, as I thrust the fifty-one thalers, nineteen and two-thirds shillings into my pocket, hurried out of the office into the free air of heaven, and turned towards the Alster Hall, in the elegantly-decorated rooms of which I speedily enjoyed a substantial breakfast.

THE HOUR-GLASS.

ALAS! how swift the moments fly!
How flash the years along!
Scarce here, yet gone already by—
The burden of a song.

See childhood, youth and manhood pass.

And age with furrowed brow;

Time was-Time shall be-drain the glass

But where in Time is now?

Time is the measure but of change;

No present hour is found;

The past, the future, fill the range

Of Time's unceasing round.

Where then is now? In realms above,

With God's atoning Lamb,

In regions of eternal love,

Where sits, enthroned, I AM.

Then, pilgrim, let thy joys and tears
On Time no longer lean;
But henceforth all thy hopes and fears
From earth's affections wean:

To God let votive accents rise;

With truth, with virtue live:
So all the bliss that Time denies,
Eternity shall give.

THE DECLINE OF ENGLAND.*

THE man who hazards in his title-page the ominous presage, and startling announcement involved in the above, is known to fame as a desperate revolutionist, with almost marvellous success; and, according to his accusers, not unknown to infamy, as an organizer of anarchy, having an insatiable thirst for blood. The days of February are his immortality; those of June his condemnation. His rise and triumph were sudden, unexpected, and complete. With one bound, and seemingly without an effort, he reached the summit of power. It was his voice that created the provisional government, an organization of supreme authority without example. He proposed the names from the façade of the Hotel de Ville, to a hundred thousand armed citizens, flushed with success, and from that vast concourse no murmur of disappointment arose. It seemed as if the whole had been pre-arranged, and that he was the apostle of the new creed, commissioned to announce the nation's will. As minister of the interior, his official instructions sounded too much of absolute command, and the passion and pride of France were startled and offended. But the boldness of his character would have borne him through this trial. He would have consummated his own daring, but for the feebleness, fickleness, and treachery of his colleagues. In selecting them, the leading idea appears to have been, to combine in the government a fair representation of the genius and progress of France, as well as the material interests of the masses. The workman Albert, was the ostensible reflex of this latter, but in reality Louis Blanc was its genius and its guide. Louis Blanc involved his country, his party, and his character, in his first crude scheme of industrial organization, and lost them all. Its failure marked the doom of his prestige and his power. The "workman never had any. His position was a false one. He was elevated to it to flatter the vanity of labor, and not to guarantee its integrity as the first and greatest interest of the State. For the fulfilment of his office, the highest genius and greatest intrepidity were required. He possessed neither, and was, from the beginning, a corpse slung to the neck of him who had to brave the roaring sea of that tempestuous time. Arago, whose lofty ideas of gov ernment were lettered in the starry spheres-Arago, foremost among living men, who could harmonize millions of luminous worlds in illimitable space-could not reconcile two hostile cobblers in the Faubourg St. Antoine, or decide between them the matter of a single hog's bristle.

These men should naturally be the chief auxiliaries of Ledru Rollin in the government. Their impotence imposed on him the task of battling alone with the selfish and conservative interests of that body. Avarice, fear, cunning-all the meaner passions leagued against him. For a while he was sustained by the doubtful, if not treacherous, eloquence of Lamartine; but that was a slender and unsound reed, and it snapped at the very approach of the energies of the bolder leader. From the hour that La

* La Decadance de l'Angleterre.-Ledru Rollin.

martine belied and betrayed the Irish deputation, he and Ledru Rollin were mortal foes. When the breach between them became open, the indignant conservative denounced and defamed the very principles, to which, as revolutionary minister, he had given a specious but false support. Ledru Rollin was then the recognized leader of the great party called "Red Republicans." Lamartine, whose logic is a mean between the fribbled and the fantastical, inferred their purpose from the color they assumed, as the "party of blood." It matters not that this was false in fact and history. It matters not that in his fragmental picture of the first revolution, wherein he was engaged in tracing the apotheosis of a name consecrated to infamy by the verdict of two ages, and all the men that filled them up, he had himself recorded the testimony that stamped his assertion as untrue. He had there said the history was too well known, and too recent to be contradicted that the red flag was hoisted as the symbol of non-resistance, and covering a prayer for mercy during the butcheries of the Champ de Mars. It matters not that the same fact was known to all France. Conservatism, loyalty, cunning, selfishness, the low avarice of the enriched Bourgeoise swelled the cry of blood, and the Red Republicans were regarded as dangerous to the progress and security of the French nation. It so happened, too, that the infidel and the socialist, the scoffer and the blasphemer, the juggler and the fanatic, who play harlequin with some new gods, abetted the politics of the Red Republicans. It was in vain they endeavored to draw distinct lines of demarkation. Communism being found on the same platform, stamped them with the character of

* Proof of this bold accusation may be deemed necessary. The present writer has, fortunately, the means of furnishing it-nay, proof, not alone that he belied and betrayed the Irish deputation and Irish nation, but that he belied and betrayed himself. Here it is:

In the first manifesto issued from his bureau and falsified by his signature, the highest mission of France, was, in pompous phrase, declared to be

"To aid all struggling nationalities."

Before the echo of this magniloquent boast had died away on the public ear, a deputation from Ireland, consisting of Wm. Smith O'Brien, Thomas F. Meagher, Richard O'Gorman, jr., and Edward Hollywood, arrived in the French capital, charged with an address congratulating the brave republicans of the Barricade. They asked no aid, begged for nothing, did not hint at any struggle in esse or in posse, in which they would claim the assistance of France. The answer of Lamartine was an ungracious refusal of unasked assistance; in other words, it was a double falsification; first, of his own voluntary and vaunted promise; and secondly, of the document actually presented to him. But this is not all. When the deputation arrived in Paris, they left a copy of their address at his bureau, as is customary, and requested an audience. It was fixed for a distant day; and on the morrow of that day a printed copy of the answer was posted up by the police, on every dead wall and post in Ireland. This could not be done without the grossest and the basest treachery, by him or through his bureau.

Yet it is not the worst feature in this transaction. During Mr. O'Brien's trial, a gentleman in Paris, John Leonard, wrote to Lamartine, stating briefly the facts as to the address, denying the assumptions of the answer, and demanding from him an explicit disavowal, which he thought would be useful on the trial. Lamartine wrote to him by return of post, distinctly and emphatically stating that neither directly nor indirectly, publicly nor privately, did Mr. O'Brien make the demand, which he had in his public answer assumed and refused to comply with.. He added his unsought testimony in favor of Mr. O'Brien's chivalrous and loyal character. The original was sent to Clonmel, and a translation of it appeared in all the English and Irish papers. But recently, in a pamphlet by Lamartine, entitled, "L'Angleterre, en 1850." he writes the following extraordinary sentence, which makes the fourth contradictory misstatement on this subject, and gives the measure of his fickleness, feebleuess, and unfaithfulness: "Quand l'Irland, alors volcauise, vint le lendemain de fevrier demander sou appué a la France contre l'Angleterre."

pillage, as the false and sickly wit of Lamartine had given them the character of blood. The doubl odium well nigh crushed them. Their chief's position became desperate, but his purpose did not abate. He shook the dew-drops from his crest, and faced his foes. The odds against him were most desperate; yet id he for a long while stand firm as a rooted oak. The passions of the people, roused by false suggestion, superstition and dread, poured on his devoted head in the excited assembly. France does not reason in her crises, and in this instance, the man she held at bay, met her anger with defiant scorn. Then it was seen how much he stood alone. His sympathising colleagues, with but few and faint exceptions, were bowed, and mute, and motionless, under that storm that howled around his naked head. Whenever the name or memory of the provisional government bespoke error, or folly, or failure, he alone was held responsible. The sublime achievement which was HIS, was never evoked. Scipio once appeased the classic mob of Rome, by appealing to his deliverance of the republic on the field of Zama. They followed him to the capitol, to return thanks to the immortal gods; but even before the shrine, on the anniversary of his triumph, their hatred of the haughty patrician hardened into stone, and the fiat of his doom was visible to the ken of the immortals on their unchastened hearts. Ledru Rollin did not make the appeal. He was busy with the future. His altar was the barricade, and he even then relied on the unexhausted and undaunted heart of the Faubourgs. Are we justified in saying this? For that he lit up the fires that blazed around these devoted suburbs on the days of June, there exists no public testimony. He retired from the city when given up to flame and steel, and only heard its terrible agony in the distance. He walked back to his place in the Assembly, over the cinders of the Rue St. Antoine, smoking in the fresh blood. Though his name was murmured in connection with that thrilling drama, he met the reproach with indignant and unshrinking defiance. In the Assembly, he vindicated his own course and policy, without retracting a word or line he ever spoke or penned. And from no furious combatant of these days of terror, when, the red flag waved in triumph over the insurgent barricade, which defied the joint assault of 120 pieces of cannon, and two hundred thousand armed men; or when, in the last paroxysm of unavailing fury, mid flame and smoke, the baffled defenders of these redoubted entrenchments, dashed their own brains out against the buried rocks of the Catacombs, did his name escape, ere grim death set his seal on their blurred lips for ever? The annals of war have nothing to record equal to that momentous struggle,-a contest against such desperate odds, a determination that outlived the last beat of the heart in the living tomb, where fire and smoke consummated what the cannon and sabre had failed in, a purpose so stern and inviolable, a defence so protracted, deaths so proud and lofty-heroism has nothing beyond; still the grandest and most unfathomable attribute of the entire, was the impenetrable secrecy which protected, even from view, the genius that planned, and the courage that provoked it. His guilt or patriotism is not here discussed, whoever he may be; but that there was such presiding genius, there cannot be a reasonable doubt. Truth to him, mid the fires of the Pantheon, and on the tottering defences around the church of St. Antoine; truth to him mid the suffocation of the charnel-house; truth to him at the trial of 15,000 citizens, condemned to a life of slavery;