tial race, that life is not worth enjoying. It is an antiquated notion, and one that we are happy to find is going out of fashion, that to be contented with the allotment of Providence is unsentimental and anti-poetical. If happiness be indeed prosaic, and the cup of inspiration is to be swallowed with a wry face, Heaven save us from any intercourse with the muses. their BLUE DEVILS. THESE Cerulean imps, from the earliest ages, have been most shamefully wronged; they have never been permitted to enjoy a trial by jury, but, were condemned by acclamation, and deprived of counsel. Our old maxim was to give the Devil his due,' but Blue devils have been proscribed without a hearing upon their merits, and many stand ready to let fall the guillotine upon their necks, and to surrender their bodies to the surgeon. This is a wanton misprision of justice, unworthy of a moral community. I now enter my protest against the validity of this sentence, and do honestly believe that they are a very useful set of elves, friends to the muses, and very active in the finale of tragedy. When our veins are too full of young blood, they peer darkly over the curtain of the future, and by grave and sombre countenances, temperate the course of hot-heeled joy, making us grave, sentimental, and poetical; they come in appropriately, when man's countenance is distended and distorted into the wrinkles of a grin, and smooth it down into the yea and nay verily of a shaking quaker. Hilarity is the antipodes of true or affected wisdom, and he who looks grave, enlarges a public estimation of his knowledge, even as a piece of crape extends its dimensions under the modus operandi of the washerwoman. The azure demons are also closely connected with sober reflection; they are handmaidens of Mammon, cater-cousins to Cupid, and the prime ministers to inheritances.-These are assertions-now for proofs. A gay, unthinking, young man, means a spendthrift. A fit of the blues is every thing but gaiety, videlicet, they stayed me once from a ball, and prevented the expenditure of a five dollar bank note, all of which gained me the credit of prudence, and forbearance from dissipation. Your old codgers are convinced, that a part of man's mind lies in his heels, and so long as these are kept from pigeon-wings and double shuffles, the head remains cool and free from fidgetty itchings, and hankerings after fiddles and ladies. Satan is thought to roar loudest for a soul in the ball-room, because it then trespasses upon the Devil's premises. But a fit of the Cerulians will drive a man out of, instead of into an assemblage of this nature, and it is ten to one that, on retirement from this tabooed place, he moralize like a duck in a thunderstorm. Argal they conduce to reflection. Secondly, they are handmaidens to Mammon-or handmen, if you please. No man who is possessed by the spirits aforesaid, will feel like spending his brownies-the theatre is worse to him than a charnel-house-and he looks at a debtor, as glum as a bum-bailiff. A hole in the elbow of his coat troubles him not, and the dinner is left untouched. Sequitur, that he must become rich; for he who has no wants will never spend his money. Thirdly, they are cater cousins to Cupid. Who ever heard of a laughing lover, that had paid his devoirs successfully? You might as well preach of a merry sexton, or of a groundand-lofty-tumbling mourner. Love and the Blues are connected by the strongest ties, for Love in its outset is connected with a melancholy feeling, and like a breeze sent through a mummied cavern, it whistles through the dry bones of lost hopes. One, to be successful, must be in despair; even as the fox feigned himself dead, to run away from death. They are prime ministers to inheritances-The staid, gloomy, money-catching boy, is the miser's darling, and when breath deserts the latter, the former is sure to finger the cash, your wild urchin, with a better head and heart, to the contrary notwithstanding. The blue devils operate among birds and beasts. The sapient owl, the reflecting cat, and the philosophical ox, owe all their credit for wisdom, to the influence of these spirits. It is said, that animals have a method of communicating their thoughts to each other-I believe it, and that man, as an animal, has a coequal faculty. I recollect, when I was beset by these imps at the age of fifteen, of laying my carcase, in extenso, at the foot of an oak, beside a brook, in one of your musing moods, when a cloud was darkening my future prospect. I was making the erudite, but profitless enquiry, why I was in existence, and what would be my destiny in a scene which had began to grow so sickly, even at that young hour. The world, He before my arrival upon its confines, was well enough, and I seemed but a mere acorn casually dropped, which Gaffer Death must sooner or later gobble down. An owl was above me, finishing rather a late dinner upon a mouse, his captive, and, like an Alderman, was wiping his face after his repast. looked down upon me, as a philosopher would upon his pupil, and winked profoundly--anon, he turned his gaze upon the sun, and the stream, and the hill, and then upon me. I understood him-agreed, quoth I-they are, indeed, glorious things, and I have the faculty for enjoying them. But why are there so many miseries connected with this weary existence; friends, but to lose them; hopes, but to be deceived; honors, but for knaves? All have said, that there is no peace but within the still grave. Then why should I have been called from nihility, to endure the pains of being, though there are a few sweets in the cup of bitterness. Give me one plain reason for my being here; one simple answer as to the purposes of my creation. Why sit you there perched upon that limb, with the privileges of soaring on high, while I grovel here like a crushed worm? The power which called me into being, and made me what I am, had a further authority; that of making me happy. Why was it not exercised?-Hoot! shouted the owl.--Well, agreed, that this thing is none of my business; yet as I have been incumbered with life, I have the right to resign it. I was no party to the contract, and existence was forced upon me ;--do you see that stream? Its simple influence can annul all claims, which pain may have upon me. I can surrender a lease of life when I like not the terms of its tenure. To who?-quoth the owl-This was done with a deliberate, yet solemn stare, and two interminable winks, which meaned a very deliberate reproof. He then, after the manner of our most celebrated orators, scratched his nose with his left claw, and afterwards pointed with it to an ox, which was quietly and laboriously tugging at a plough. I know, replied I, that I might have been a beast, deprived of liberty, and subject to much cruelty-but to have been like you, so contemplative, so thoughful, so much given to philosophy, and apparently, to say the least, having such an insight into futurity, would have been far better than to have been the thing I am. At this he appeared highly flattered, gave his woolly head a consequential shake. I thought at this moment that I had discovered another pair of owl's eyes under the green leaves, and behind my philosophical instructor-in another moment down plumped a cat, bearing off in its and jaws, my friend, the owl, who looked most marvellously wise, but uncomfortably astonished.-True, quoth I, things are well ordered, and a fit of the blues does a man good sometimes. They make us look upon the dark side of our existence, and we become wiser from a reflection of the fitness of things. To have been an owl would have been worse, than even to be a discontented boy. What would Byron and the whole host of melancholy poets have been, had they not felt the influence of the blue devils? Petrarch might have been a merry andrew and Gray's elegy a Yankee doodle. No one feels truly happy, unless a tincture of their sadness be infused in the cup of his joy. Even as I write I feel their influence as they are throwing their mantle over my spirits, and they, from the dying embers of the fire will conjure up, castles and graves and saddened recollections, in a Jaques-like mood, and I would not exchange the revery over which they will preside, for all the gairish, heartless, thoughtless, grinning mockery, which wears the laughing semblance of joy, when the reality of sober enjoyment is as far from it as man is from Paradise. Give me my honest, truth telling friends, the blues, and procul este profani, ye whited sepulchres of unmeaning merriment. ICHABOD. THE MUSIC OF THE WINDS. Ye make sad music in my heart, I 've heard ye,-when your notes were sweet Breath'd, when long parted lovers meet, The fond heart's sweetest melody, POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION. 6 'Non omnis moriar There are few motives of action so powerful, as the desire of obtaining that lasting fame and perpetuity of praise which,' we are told, God and good men have consented shall be the reward of those, whose labours advance the good of mankind.' Though founded on selfishness, it has enlisted its followers on the side of virtue; indifferent, perhaps, to her native charms, but allured by the splendor of her dowry: willing, as in the ancient temples, to sacrifice at her altar, because hers is the only avenue to ever-enduring fame. While the desire of posthumous reputation is thus a prevailing motive to effort, the expectation of possessing it is a rich consolation under temporary misfortune and disgrace. When fallen upon evil times and evil tongues,' many, like Milton, |