The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1844-04-23 00:00:00

" BUMMER.

The full ripe corn i, bending
In waves of golden ,fight,
The new mown lily is sending
Its scents upon the night.
The breeze is softly sighing,
To cool the parched flowers ;
The rain to see them dying,
W eps forth its gentle showers.
Th r merry fish are playing.
Adown yon chrystql stream,
And night from day is straying,
As twilight gives its glea n.
And thus manhood in its prime is fu I, and ripe, and str.,ng,
And it scarcely deems that time can do its beauty wrong;
"Like the merry fish we play adown the, stream of life,
And we reek not of the day that gathers whit is rife.

AVTUMN.
The flowers are all fading,
Their scents are rifled now,
And night sends forth her shading
Along the mount,in's brow;
The bee hath ceased its winging
To flowers at early morn ;
The birds have ceased their singing,
The scythe hath mown the corn;
The harvest now is gathered,
Protected from the clime,—
'The •eaves are seared and wither'd,
That late shone in their prime.

Thus when fourscore years are gone o'er the frail life of man,
Time sits heavy on his throne, as near his brow we scan;
Like the autumn leaf that tails when winds the branches Wave,
Like night-shadows daylight palls,—like all, he finds a grave."

Already was the summer blending gradually wrh autumn,
but it was not this so much as the train of thought awakened
in the great Chuich, which seemed to me so much in unison
with the beautitul poetry I have quoted.

[ORIGINAL.]
" SITTING ON A RAIL."
BIT SECOND.

'Didn't we laugh heartily when sitting on a rail in a se-
cond class, whilst pausing at the Wigan station ? We es-
pied a drunken old man lifted in by his friends, whose
teeth were gone, and the sands of life had well nigh run
their last, as a device occurred to his friend in order to
preveat him losing his ticket, he plucked it out of the
fumbling old man's hand, and sticking it in his hat, com-
mitted it to the safe-bind—safe-find guardianship of his
hat-band. " There then now, when the guard comes,
he'll see thy ticket just like every body else's, and thou'lt
have no more trouble about it !" The old man behaved
during the rest of the journey as all drunken old men, or
drunken young men will, replying when nobody spoke to
him, singing to himself, interpolating the conversation
around him with interjections, adjectives, and the like,
ridiculously droll from their very irrelevancy ; but we
shall not take upon ourselves to record either the sayings
or doings of this drunken old man, lest ears polite should
jar. But didn't we laugh again, more than before?—when,
just as the train was starting, a young man standing beside
the rail; gave us a parting nod, with apparently no ordi-
nary significancy of expression, though it struck us at the
-time he must have the advantage over us in the matter of
recollected acquaintanceship, our memory not serving us
rightly to the amount of recognition, on our part, of an
old friend. We stared—we prepared to look even grate-
fully upon the features of a fellow-creature, who seemed
inclined to bestow upon us this expression of parting in-
terest and regard ! 'Twas but for half a moment we felt
in this suspense, for a whole process of thought can take
placein less than the smallest lapse of time ; and just when
we were getting up a most proper nod in reply, we were
surprised to observe a distinct nod of the fullest recognition
power got up and performed by a party who sat opposite
to us!! We sperk advisedly when we aver that this was
a case of the clearest mistake possible on our part—the
convergence of the two organs of vision in a focus with
the middle line of the face, corresponding to the point of
the nose and the tip of the chin, indicating that the visual
rays in general naturally establish a " grand junction ter-
minus" not far off, and enjoy their concentrated focus in
sympathy and common with the other adjective features
of the countenance. Judging then from these data, which
we don't mind the danger of being contradicted in, whilst
looking earnestly at the man's three-quarters face, we did
feel comph te:y floored at the idea of a nod which was
clearly meant for us, being appropriated by any one else,
and further that such should be " all right," and the guard
again " beg leave to sit—on a rail ;" puzzling ourselves to
make out whether, in the present case, mesmerism had
attained so far as to make angles of incidence and angles ;
of reflection, in matters of parting, equal to each other, as
in the matter of meetinz. We thought of the 'Yankee ex- 1
periment with the " bowl of treacle," and the " mirror of
ink," as reflecting media; but our philoshphy tumbled
down from her ideal range, upwardstowards theledge of cau-
sality and comparison, when, on the man turning his face
by chance more fully towards the carriage, we discovered
that the eye nearest to us " had no connexion with the
other concern on the other side of the way !" correspon-
dence having been mutually declined, we suppose, from
the reason we once saw labelled up in an Irish village,
over an artisan's door, " II opposition is the life o' trade."
Backward we fell in our seat, as far as we could, cramming
our handkerchief into our mouth, endeavouring to stifle a ;
huge laughing fit, which immediately assailed us on our
discovering that the diagonal of a squint had well nigh un-
done
us ! and that we were liable to be tried for poaching
in our opposite neighbour's preserve !
After progressing along our journey for mile upon mile
of jar and rattle—rattle and jar—we vv re favoured at one
of the stations with the company of a little girl, placed un-
der the care of the guard by some ladies from whom she
parted, in the innocent sadness of childhood's simplicity ;
but the tears also rolled fastly one after another down her
cheek, indicative of sorrow at parting with her friends.
Woman's tears at parting moments are not infrequent
episodes in every day life; but girlhood's tears are less
scarce still, being their ready silver currency whenever
golden moments are about to be broken up and exchanged !
Whilst the train slowly increased towards its velocity, our
sympathies could not be entirely diverted from our little
travelling companion, any more than that of others pre-
sent, not excepting the iron-faced guard, to whose tender
solicitude her juvenile fears had been consigned, a lamb of
the human flock ; and to whose guardianship as well, we
afterwards observed, a bleating lamb of a less gifted race
had been committed, and which occupied the " locker"
under her seat, and which he lugged out, tied by a fore
and hind leg together, after a few mites run, having much
enjoyed, doubtless, the ride it had " booked" for, its own ,
locomotives being now sick of their strike fur work !
'What ails thee, young one ? what ? why pull so a; thy cord ?'

Perhaps the rapid motion of the train tends to subdue
the activity of thought, and exuberance of restless obser-
vations, down into the more sober channel of reflection,
not less profitable perhaps than the former, either in point
of direct mental exercise or habit; yet we remarked that
whilst for some time this state of mind may combine the
dulee with the utile, still that after a time the physical
condition of being constantly whirl ng on a rail tends to
produce a gradually increasing listlessness or vacuity of
thought, upon which commonly succeeds a sleepy state—
a state not altogether devoid of danger, when the party
has passed the meridian of life, and immediately after
having made a very full or hasty meal ; apoplexy having
in more than one or two instances occurred to such par-
ties, and that of a fatal character, owing in some cases to
the want of sufficiently early discovery,—and medical aid.
But in reference to the soporific influence of " sitting on
a rail," and whirl, whirl, whirl ; the rapid transit of object
after object, in seeming giddy dance, perhaps may be con-
sidered a semi-mesmeric state, a la mode de Braid,
wherein the fatigue of the organ of vision seems capable
of inducing a corresponding state in the brain; at least,
to. such class of phenomena it seems to us not altogether
wide of the mark to refer the state alluded to. Whether
or not we should very soon, in that not very particularly
attractive part of the country, have fallen a ready prey to
this act-of-parliament mode of carrying out mesmeric
erperiments by wholesale, we don't undertake positively
to guess, nor would it much concern our readei whichever
way we might have ultimately concluded ourselves to
have been tested. No doubt the engineer would have
done his best to have had us asleep like many of the rest;
but "returningto our sheep"—orlamb rather—this unlock-
ing of the crystal sluices for the relief of overwrought
sensibility, eve❑ in a child, is a subject that was at once
calculated to awaken the curiosity of the guard and our-
self, prompted perhaps by a corresponding flow of the
milk of human kindness in our not-altogether-obdurate
breasts. Surely we might take credit for the former as a
qualification of benevolence rather than anything else,
seeing that the joys and sorrows of childhood, as they
ebb and flow, may be said never to appeal in vain tb the
sympathy of those around them, be they old or be they
young. If old, they read before them the transcripts of
their own youthful hours drawn to the real life, in unso-
phisticated naivete of character. Childhood's smile is
reflected from their own matured features, almost, we
may say, with the faithful portraiture of youthful origi-
nali.y : the tears of childhood have called forth, before
now, a correspondent welling up of tears in the eyes of
old age,or of ordinary indifference to human passions. This
is matter of trite remark, which every one can make,
even the most superficial observer of mankind ; but is it
as generally observed how beautiful and passing wise are
the arrangements of Providence, whereby age shall sym-
pathise with youth in stronger and more intensely glowing
interest, because, as Wordsworth says in one of his
beautiful lines,