not very

far up,

either,

I LIVE in one of the upper wards of the city say above the second belt of the island, Twenty-third street. My drawing-room windows look into a tract of vacant lots on the opposite side of the street.

It has afforded me not a few reflections on the mutability of human affairs, to watch the chances and changes this spot has undergone. Two years ago, it was a beautiful green meadow, carefully protected by a substantial fence, and now, by the mere progress of events, and without any particular design of any person, and apparently without human agency, it has become an uncommonly cominon common; in short, a 'howling wilderness.' One morning, I missed a plank from the fence; a few days later, the night having been severely cold, another plank disappeared. Doubtless some forlorn tea-kettle boiled stealthily that night by virtue of the larceny; or may-hap some poor devil slept on the soft side of the fugitive plank, and so had 'bed and board' together. At all events, one by one the parts of the fence dropped away, until the inclosure was as bare of fence as a prairie or a desert. Then the housemaids in the neighborhood discovered it was an admirable place to deposit their coal-ashes; this was soon followed by dirt-cartmen, occasionally digging and taking away a few loads of earth. The housemaids made a series of little mounds of ashes, and the cartmen digged little pits all over the ground, giving it quite a variegated appearance. Soon after, it was found to be a useful place for some builders in the neighborhood wherein to haul their rubbish from the street, and thus by imperceptible degrees it has become the common dumping-ground of the upper wards of the city. Indeed, there now seems to be a strife among the various members of the animal kingdom around these parts, which shall put it to the basest uses.

Well, why don't I abate the nuisance? Why don't I petition the Common Council to have the vacant lots fenced? That is just what I am about to tell you. I know something about the Common Council, and the fate of petitions of such obscure persons as myself. Haud inexpertus loquor.

I am a great enemy of dark streets; and although in favor of equal rights, I dislike dark piers. I like a shaded room, and a shaded light, and shady places, but I have a horror of dark streets. From childhood I have thrilled with horror at a thousand horrid outrages perpetrated under the protecting cover of the darkness of our streets. By constitution and association, and from early conviction, I have always been a stickler for well-lighted streets.

'Well, not exactly; but it would be immediately; the gas was in the house, and consequently in the street; and there was nothing to be done but to set the posts, and this the Gas Company were always ready to do for the sake of supplying the gas; the street had just been built up, or the lamps would have been up before.'

This looked reasonable. Here was a new row of houses running down the whole street now just opened for occupancy, and there seemed to have been no particular necessity for the gas-lights in the street before this; and so, not, however, without some misgivings, I signed the documents and became owner of an estate for years in a house and lot in street.

I took possession, and after I had got comfortably settled, and had waited a reasonable time, I began to look anxiously each day for the lamp-posts. Day after day, at the earliest dawn and the latest hour at night, I peered from my favorite windows to look for the lamp-posts and the gas-lamps. The street had been, once upon a time, lighted with oil, and some of the old posts remained. Occasionally some wag of a lamp-lighter would replenish some of these old and battered lamps, and light up on some very dark night. What a desperate time they had with those old oil-lamps! They looked like the flickering of dissipated fire-flies in summer, straggling staggering home near day-break, after a carouse. True they were suggestive of the 'light of other days;' but they gave no light; they kept it all themselves. You could, indeed, by an effort, see where they were, but it defied all your knowledge of streetlatitude and longitude to tell where you were yourself. Wayfarers passing our street at night set up a sort of hollow whistle, like that practised by boys passing through a country church-yard at night. Indeed, these old spectral lamps looked more like phosphorescent vapor hanging over graves, than any mechanical attempt toward lighting the streets. One very cold night, I was roused about an hour before day-break by a violent ringing at the street door-bell, and after getting up shivering, and hailing my unwelcome guest from an upper window, I learned that he had lost his way in the thick darkness, and seeing my night-lamp burning, and thinking any port in a storm,' had made a desperate lunge at my door-bell, in hopes of getting some information of his whereabouts. Frequently, my family were disturbed in the evening by thumping at our front-door, it being too dark to find the bell-pull, by persons in pursuit of information of the number of the house. Our friends could never find us in the evening. The street became the haunt of the noisiest of cats and dogs, and was avoided by the policemen as if it had been holy ground. One of our neighbors always forgot to shovel the snow and ice from his side-walk; and occasionally, in the dark, a limb would be broken, or a joint dislocated, by a passer-by. But the victim could not read my delinquent neighbor's number or name in the thick darkness, and by day-light he would never know the place; and thus my neighbor escaped scot-free.

These things grieved me terribly. I fretted, and fumed, and v. cre

But it

myself to a thread, about the dark street. Still, I was so confident that each day would bring gas-lights, that I did not think of attempting to hasten it. Other streets, above us and on each side, by degrees were lighted; we escaped. Surely, our turn would come next. did not. And still other streets, more remote, were lighted, and we were left in Cimmerian darkness. Finally, it became a desperate matter, and I set about it seriously, to remedy the evil, and went to see the Gas Company. Great was my wrath! I prepared a short catalogue of the horrid accidents that had occurred mainly from their neglect of their own pecuniary interest, too, in not putting gas-lamps in the streets. Judge of my indignant surprise-it was not their business at all! I might have waited until doomsday for them to move; they had nothing to do with it; wished they had; the lamps would soon be up if it was their business! I must apply to the Inspector of Lamps and Gas!

I swallowed my rage, and went to see the Inspector of Lamps and Gas; and there learned that I must petition the Corporation. I petitioned the Corporation; all my neighbors signed the petition: we got our alderman to present the document. It was sent to a committee, and now, surely, thought I, we shall have the gas immediately. When I read in the morning-paper that the Common Council had heard our prayer, and sent it to a committee, I felt as though the thing was done. At night, I looked to see if the lamps were up, and then chided myself for my impatience. I went through this game for some days; then weeks passed, and I began to grow impatient. I instituted an inquiry at the City Hall, after the Committee and our petition, and learned the Committee had not yet' sat upon it.' Heigho!

Well, I waited weeks longer, and then months; wrote to the Inspector of Lamps and Gas, scolded the Corporation Attorney, defamed the Chief of Police, made caricatures of the Mayor, and joined in the general hue-and-cry, in blowing up the City Government generally. All was unavailing. Winter passed away, and summer and winter, and summer again: the gas did not come. At length-long, however, after I had abandoned the project—the new Common Council went into office, or the old one went out, or the gas-company found us out and took the matter in hand, or the Committee became a stock-holder in the Gas Company, or somehow, one morning in February last, I was awakened earlier than usual by a sound in the street of men at work; and behold the gas lamp-posts were actually being set!- and, after waiting about a month longer for the lanterns, and a month longer for the pipes to be made to connect, in the month of April, Anno DOMINI 1854, after a probation of upward of thirty months, lighted with gas. And so ended my first and last petition to the

Common Council.

street was

VOL. XLIII.

INEXORABLE

FATE.'

'WITH equal foot, rich friend, impartial FATE
Knocks at the cottage and the palace-gate;
Life's span forbids thee to extend thy cares,
And stretch thy hopes beyond thy years.'

33

A POETICAL

AUTOGRAPH

LETTER.

THE gentleman whose name appears in the following lines, having frequently applied to the ladywriter, for an autograph letter written by her, she lately gratified him in the annexed lines.

INVOKING each spirit of earth and of air,

For a subject before never thought on,
And listening for rappings from table or chair,
I address you, my dear Mr. LAUGHTON,
Resolving at once, I will candidly own,

To rely on my own mental forces,

The marrow and pith of my thoughts to make known
Without any wooden resources.

I shall ask you a riddle: What's this I have found?
A treasure that ne'er will deceive me;

That pleases all senses; and you, I'll be bound,
When I tell you its name, will believe me.
But ah! Sir, not yet will I make you so wise;
You must guess, while I state its perfections;

It has beauty, wit, grace; form, feature, lips, eyes!
Do you guess? But there's more recollections:
What is it which makes your best hopes still more bright?
Your stubbornest whims to surrender?

That covers your faults with its mantle of light,

And makes your tough nature quite tender?

Do you guess at my riddle? methinks in your glance
A spirit there merrily glistens,

Which without conjuration, or mesmeric trance,
Takes in the whole truth while it listens.

Yes, yes, my dear Sir, 't is your MARY I mean,
The wife and the friend beyond prizing,

Whose influence is felt like the star-light serene,

Or wind from the violet rising.

Long, long be it thus; and when old age shall come,

May young star-beams and zephyrs still brighten your home;
May your face have no wrinkles these two hundred years;

Your bright eyes no dimness, no deafness your ears.

The same to your wifie, although I'm afraid

That TIME, who so many old ladies hath made,
Will ne'er let her pass without touch of his claw
When wanting a bon-bon to stuff in his maw.
With this horrible fantasy darkening my mood,
I'm ashamed to write farther, and therefore conclude,
Expecting no answer, at least, not until

My merits appear by a clause in your will,
Some few thousand dollars, house, horse, or piano,
In proof of your friendship for MARY BALMANNO.

P. S. If these trifling objects for others you save,

I'll accept e'en a 'gold-mine,' or small 'treasure-cave,'
Where pirate Sultanas at ease have reclined,

Curled their tresses in bank-notes, and left them behind.

LITERARY NOTICES.

APHEILA, AND OTHER POEMS. By Two COUSINS of the South, Miss JULIA PLEASANTS and THOMAS BIBB BRADLEY. In one volume: pp. 272. New-York: CHARLES SCRIBNER. WITH much that is not of a very high order of merit, this volume contains examples of very fair poetry. The defects are, mannerism, and a certain want of originality and vigor. And yet the work is a work of promise, and proves that the authors who sometimes write so well, are capable of even better things. As specimens of the writers' powers, we present a poem from each, which impressed us most favorably among the contents of the book. The first, 'Lines on receiving an Eagle's Plume,' is by Miss PLEASANTS:

'AN eagle's plume! an eagle's plume!

How bravely hath it battled back
The rolling clouds, the tempest's gloom,
And swept the sun's meridian track.
A thing of air, it proudly spurned

The earth-born storm, the levin's glare,
And like a thought, for ever turned,

In starward triumph, through the air.

'An eagle's plume! in wheeling flight,
Swift as a clarion's note it rose
From some untrodden mountain-height,
Of purple mists and shining snows.
And far across the desert sky,

It winnowed plains of azure dearth,
And bore the camel-bird on high,

A herald from the lowly earth.

'An eagle's plume! the skies grew dark,
But o'er the sea it fleetly sped,
The sea where many a gallant barque
Before the driving tempest fled.
And through the zenith, blue and gold,
It soared above the sulphurous cloud,
While fast the rushing waters rolled

O'er stem, and stern, and swelling shroud.'

'An eagle's plume! an eagle's plume!

It burst through floods of fiery rain,
When culverin's crash and cannon's boom
Broke madly o'er the battle-plain:
A starry standard floated there,

Above its folds it quivering hung,
And loudly on the leaden air

The deafening shout of 'Victory!' rung.
'An eagle-plume, from FREEDOM's wing;
It skirts the hills of Northern Maine,
And bathes in every golden spring
On California's mountain chain.
It rises, like a glorious star,

Where wild Atlantic surges roar,
And flies, in swooping circles, far
Along the lone Pacific shore.

'An eagle's plume! would that my soul
Might burst as chainless and as free,
Above the stormy clouds, that roll

Across this life's tempestuous sea.
And oh! when Life's dark goal is won,
That it might spurn the vanquished tomb,
And soar beyond the flaming sun,
An eagle's plume! an eagle's plume!'

'A Sister's Reverie' is by Mr. BRADLEY.

His efforts with a longer measure

are very creditable, particularly The Dream of Ponce de Leon,' in three

'parts,' but it is too long to quote entire. We cite the first-named:

'SAD Vesper-bells! how sweet your chimes,

Thrilling my soul like poet's rhymes,

Sung low at tranquil even!