The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1844-08-13 00:00:00

iittr.faturr.

POETRY.

AN OLD MAN'S MUSINGS.

(Front " Echoes of Mind," No. I.)

" Last scene of all
That ends this strange eventful history,
In second childishness and mere ob iviun."
As You Like It,

I am old, I am old, my hair is grey,
The strength of my manhood hath passed away.
And all things around me seem strange and cold,
And not as they used to be of old.
The young and the gay, they care not for me;
How should they ?—their hearts are full of glee ;
Their hopes are blooming. and mine have faded,
They know not yet what my brow bath o'er shaded.
I am old, I am old; I am left alone;
The joys of my youth have long since flown.

Hark! there's a whisper that comes through the trees,
Borne on the wings of the scented breeze;
And it seems to tell of the years gone by,
And of hopes that I deemed were too bright to die.
It comes from the hours of my childhood now,
And gently it fans my old wrinkled brow.
It tells of the flowers that decked the bowers,
Wherein I once spent such happy hours,
When my heart rejoiced in a holy love,
That resteth now in its home above.
It tells of the blossoms of early youth,
When all seemed fairness and beauty and truth ;
And now it comes with a ruder blast,
As the years of manhood are sweeping past,
And the tall trees bend before the winds,
As the years bow down the pride of our minds.
And sternly it comes, and it scatters the leaves,
As time does the hopes that our fancy weaves;
And now it is sinking again to rest,
As the pa, sions do in an old man's breast.

The breezes are hushed, the Spirit is gone,—
Gone to the realms of laughter and song.
Bright spirits dwell with the young and the gay,
They care not with me an old man to stay ;
But they came from heaven my old heart to cheer,
They have brought to my old eye a childhood's tear.
The chords of my heart I thought were all broken!
The Spirit hath touched them, once more have they spoken.

And now there shall gleam through the shadow of years,
My childhood's glad hopes, and its fleeting tears ;
And fancy shall bring back my bright days again,
As echo repeats the last notes of the strain.
Men sort not with children—they sort not with me ;
What care I for that, if a child's heart of glee
Will come back again to this worn-out breast,
And cheer its last days till it sink to rest,
Like a play-tired child in the arms of Ills love,
Who bath said, " Ye shall never see heaven above,
Till humbled in spirit, and undefiled,
Your hearts are as pure as this little child "

C. W. M.

NOTICES.

Blaekwood's Magazine.

The first article in this magazine for the present month
is of painful interest, relating, as it does, to the sad tra-
gedy of Affghanistan. The writer has evidently studied
the subject with great attention, and recapitulates under
five distinct heads the blundering and infatuation of the
leaders of the British troops in that lamentable series of
conflicts in which 17,000 valuable lives were sacrificed,
and the military banners of England were for a time tar-
nished, not, indeed, by want of prowess in those who ral-
lied around them, but by a want of foresight, and of that
"discretion " which especially in wars with treacherous
and unfeeling barbarians strong in their native fastnesses,
and innured to the rigours of their own clime, is, after all,
" the better part of valour." Ably, however, as the sub-
ject is handled, and incontestibly just as are the severe
reprehensions of the writer, we question the policy of re-
curring to a subject, the reminiscence of which inflicts a
national pang, which can result in no good that we can
perceive, but, on the contrary, serve to cherish in the
minds of suffering survivors a feeling of indignation and
mistrust towards our rulers in the east, and (by our ad-
missions) gratify would-be belligerent foreigners,
s,jealous
of our general power and our glories, who rejoice in our
discomfiture in any part of the globe, from whatever un-
toward circumstances it may arise. Our author himself
makes a sort of apology for resuscitating a topic which by
almost common consent has been consigned, not without
tears, to the obliterating waters of Lithi ; and he is, we
think, blameable in again harrowing it up, without sug-
gesting any means, except by inference, of averting the
recurrence of a similar catastrophe. Why did he not,
since he would recur to these appalling disasters, urge
upon the government the necessity of a rigid investigation
by court martial of the whole affair, so that the parties
alleged to be grievously in fault might be pronounced
guilty and punished accordingly, or stand acquitted of the
higher offence from evidence of error in judgment. On
this point we have no hesitation in stating that our home
ministry have been culpably remiss, and it was the only
atonement they could have made to the relatives of those
whose remains were left in thousands to bleach on the
wilds of Upper India.—" Etching Thoughts by the Etch-
ing Club" is cleverly written, exhibiting in a pleasing
manner the worth and the neglect of the art. " A Love
Chase, in Prose" is amusing but of moderate merit—the
close especially being abrupt, and deficient in retributive
justice to the swindling coterie of the village of Wimble-
ton. The account of the ancient canal between the Nile
ILIA the Red Sea will be read with interest. The Tradi-
tions and Tales of Upper Lusatia are continued. The
tale of the Dwarf's Will occupies the present part, and is
curious, while it conveys a sound moral. The remarks on
Schiller's Maid of Orleans" are tastefully written.
"The Stolen Child," a tale of the back woods, wrought
np fromthe particulars of an incident related in the Mis-
sissippi newspapers of 1825-6, contains a good description
of the interior wilds of the far west. The last article is a
review of the recently published Life of Lord Eldon, by
Horace Twiss, and is replete with anecdote. We give
some extracts in our present number.

The Mysteries of Paris. Chapman and Hall, London.
We have received Parts I. and 11. of "the only English
edition (of this extraordinary work) authorised by M.
Eugene Sue," the gifted author ; and it is got up in a
manner highly creditable to the publishers, whether as
regards the apparent fidelity of the translation, the beauty
of the typography, or the excellence and number of the
illustrations, which last are highly sketchy and effective,
maintaining a vraisemblance of the several actors in the
stirring drama, by which they are instantly recognised in
the varied scenes, be they disguised or in their usual cos-
tume. Of the merits of the work as a literary produc-
tion, we find it difficult to speak in terms of adequate
praise. The writer is evidently a man of powerful con-
ception, and a shrewd observer of human character, both
in its sunny and in its dreariest and most revolting aspect;
and, so far as we have yet perused his narrative, he has
excited and sustained in us a deep interest in the fortunes
and the fate of those whose portraitures he so vigorously
depicts, and which are enhanced by striking contrasts of
disposition and pursuit, and, above all, by rapidity of in-
cident. Nothing can be more charming or affecting than
the innocent, confiding, sensible, and naturally-refined
character of the Gonaleuse, otherwise" Fleur-de-Marie,"
a deserted girl thrown unprotected (at first) upon the un-
pitying world, and suffering numerous hardships and pri-
vations amongst the most abandoned and wicked of her
species ;—nothing more generous, but firm and disinte-
rested, than that of Rodolph, " the unknown," who, by
the very nobility of his nature, though by personal chas-
tisement in the first instance, redeems to grateful and
honourable feelings the hardened, but not impenetrable
or dishonest " Chourineur." The " Schoolmaster," a
returned and desperate convict, who had deserted and
wronged his family, and had more than once stained his
hands with blood, meets, at an early part of his second
career of guilt with an awful punishment—short only of
an ignominious death on the scaffold—namely, the instant
deprivation of sight, which denies him the power of fur-
ther mischief; and he is left by those lie has most injured
with ample means to prolong life in penitence and player.
The horrible situation in which he had previously left
Rodolph to perish in the vault of " The Bleeding Heart"
—a low tavern resort of the worst description, concealed
in a ditch near Paris, and in which he is nearly drowned
.before he is rescued—is fearfully worked up. The history
of La Gonaleuse from her childhood—with the old Ogress
(a returned female convict), who kept a drinking-shop,
the resort of felons, thieves, assassins, and the dregs of
Parisian society—is related by herself with great feeling
'and simplicity ; and " the unknown," who listens to her
story, rescues her from that den of infamy, still virtuous,
and in the early bloom of womanhood. We have not
seen the whole work, although it has already had a great
run in France, and (in a spurious English edition) in the
United States ; but we conjecture that " Fleur-de-Marie"
will turn out to be of noble family, and that " the lost
son," in search of whom Rodolph resembles Ulysses in
seeking his own, will also be restored to his parental
rights. The present edition of the work is a translation,
which, according to the prospectus, " repudiates every
thing that can by possibility be thought offensive to the
English reader, yet preserves that intense interest which
has given it such universal popularity." We shall pro-
bably give some extracts hereafter.

The Civil Engineer and Architects Journal. R. Groom-
bridge, London.
We have received another number of this "Journal of
tho Arts, Sciences, Public Works, Railways, Steam Na-
vigation, Mining, and Machinery," and it contains many
articles important to those inthrested in the scientific and
mechanical advancement of our country, with numerous
diagrams and illustrations. In noticing the proceedings
of the Institute of Civil Engineers, the paper of our
'townsman, Mr. John Grantham, there read in February
last, on the experiments mode on a vessel called the " Li-
verpool Screw," fitted with Grantham's engines and
Woodcroft's screw propeller, is favourably noticed, and
the discussion that ensued is reported, with illustrations
of various sizes and fans. Mr. Rennie, C.E., after re-
marking on experiments made by various parties with the
screw as a propeller, said " It was, however, Mr. F, P.
Smith who first rendered the screw-propeller practically
useful
for his perseverance, being aided by spirited capi-
talists, induced the building of the Archimedes steamer, the
machinery of which was constructed by Messrs. G. and J.
Rennie, in
' 1839. The results obtained from that vessel
were well known, and caused the subsequent construction
of the Princess Royal, the Great Northern, H.M.S.V.
the Rattler, and the Dwarf, formerly the Mermaid ; also
Great Britain, which last not having yet been to,, sea,
Could only be mentioned as a
have already given an abstract of Mr. projected experiment."
Pst
paper.l
we give in another column some extracts from tiista-
lented and cheap periodical.

a,l, .L9ndon.
The Library of Travel. Chapman and Had
Part IV. of this work has come to hand,
n 1
tinuation of Syria and the I:loly.Lan,d. The editor in c
tor con.
R. Kelly, has exercised a wise discretion in approuriatir.
the best portions of the information collected by the mostng
celebrated travellers of ,this and other countries, and the
work is illustrated by a great number of tmely executed