The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-12-16 00:00:00

THE PRESS.

BY JAMES MONTGOMERY, ESQ.

THE PRESS : what is the Press ? I cried ;
When thus a wondrous voice replied :
In me all human knowledge dwells ;
The oracle of oracles,
Past, present, future, I reveal,
Or in oblivious silence seal :
What I preserve can perish never—
What I forego is lost for ever.

I speak all languages; by me
The deaf may hear, the blind may see,
The dumb converse, the dead of old
Communion with the living hold.
All lands are one beneath my rule,
All nations learners in my school ;
Men of all ages, everywhere,
Become contemporaries there.

What is the Press ? 'Tis what the tongue
Was to the world when Time was young,
When, by tradition. sire to son
Conveyed whate'er was known or done ;
But fact and fiction so were mixed,
That boundaries never could be fix'd.
What is the Press? 'Tis that which taught,
By hieroglyphic forms of thought,
Lore, from the vulgar proudly hid,
Like treasures in a pyramid;
For knowledge then was mystery,
A captive under lock and key,
By Priests and Princes held in thrall,
Of little use, or none at all;
Till the redoubted Alphabet
Free their own great deliverer set,
At whose command, by simplest spells,
They work their mental miracles.

What is the Press ? 'Tis what the pen
Was thrice ten centuries to men,
When sybil leaves lend wings to words,
Or, caged in books, they sang like birds ;
But slow the pen, and frail the page—
To write twelve folios ask'd an age ;
And a pet babe, in sport, might spoil
The fruits of twenty authors' toil.

A power was wanting to insure
Life to works worthy to endure—
A power the race to multiply
Of intellectual polypi:
It came, all hardships to redress;
And Truth and Virtue hail'd the Press !

What am I, then ? lam a power
Years cannot waste, nor flames devour,
Nor waters drown, nor tyrants bind ;
I am the mirror of man's mind,
In whose serene, impassive face,
What cannot die on earth you trace—
Not phantom shapes that come and fly,
But like the concave of the sky,
In which the stars. by night and day,
Seen or unseen, hold on their way.
Myself withdrawn from mortal sight,
I am invisible as light—
Light which, revealing all beside,
Itself within itself can hide;
The things of darkness I make bare,.
And, nowhere seen. I'm everywhere.
All that philosophy has sought,
Science discover'd, genius wrought;
All that reflective memory stores,
Or rich imagination pours ;
All that the wit of man conceives ;
All that he wishes. hopes, believes ;
All that he loves, or fears, or hates ;
All that to heaven and earth relates ;
These are the lesson: that I teach
By speaking silence—silent speech.
Ah ! who like me can bless or curse ?
What can be better, what be worse,
Than language framed for Paradise,
Or sold to infamy and vice ?
Blest be the man by whom I bless ;
Accursed he Who wrongs the Press ;
The reprobate in prose and song,
Who wields the power of right for wrong—
Wrong, to out-last his laurell'd tomb,
And haunt the earth till crack of doom !

LITERARY NOTICE.

Eglinton Park Meeting.

We noticed in our paper the week before last the poetics
abilities of Mr. John Ramsay, Kilmarnock, as displayed in
the above work, and promised on a future occasion to give a
short extract. We have since perused the book, and feel de-
lighted with the many very beautifully descriptive scenes,
so true to nature's self, which the poets of past ages might
in reality have been proud of; while his other styles of com-
position lack nothing. The following is an extract :
In radiant majesty the source of light
Arose, and walked the chambers of the east,
And bade the seas and rivers sparkle bright,
And cheered afar the lonely monntains' breast,
Whose shaggy top was veiled in vapours white—
Where soared, sublime, the eagle o'er her nest,
By dreary cairn ;—th' unconscious lamb and ewe
Grazed, 'mong red heath, wild thyme, and harebell blue.
And on a rock, coeval with the earth,
__

Where time 'had toiled till with hii toil turned grey,
The shepherd sat, and eyed, in all her mirth,
Nature rejoice along life's flowery way—
From blossomed thorn the mavis warbled forth,
The linnet from the broom and birchen spray,
The cushat mourned, and as the bass to all,
Loud thundered o'er the rock the mighty waterfall.

Descending then along the misty plain,
On rapid wing, the raptured muse surveyed,
Rich lawns, extending even to the main,
And groves And vales in .tainmer's powp arraycd ;
And waving woods, now lost, and now again
The broad bright river in his strength displayed,
Proud aristocracy's bedazzling bower,
The lone sad remnants of the feudal tower.
Far other features showed the city's face,
Buildings on buildings piled unto the sky,
The vagrant curs about the
.market-place,
The high slow-moving wain, the driver's cry,
The bawling sweep, the tippler on the chase,
Of stunted form, pale cheek, and heavy eye ;
Toils various tribes unto their tasks repair,
The drunkard to his den of frenzy despair.
0, Heaven ! what means this vortex we behold
Of human passions, human joys and woes,
Of vast extremes, and much that is untold
In life's retreats ? For ever onward flows
Time's tide, in which we rise but to be rolled
As wrecks, with all our transports and our throes,
Down to that deep impenetrable gloom
That hangs o'er all that lies beyond the tomb.

VARIETIES.

It it enough for the present state of things that men act
well. Of their motives none but God can judge.

" I'll be blessed if 1 do," as the girl said when her lover
asked her to be married.

A correspondent of the Picayune paper has such a cold in
his head that he can't wash his face without freezing the
water.

A young lady writes from Ohio, that commercial affairs
are so bad, that the young men are insolvent, and can't pay
their addresses.

" I am happy, Ned, to hear the report that you have suc-
ceeded to a large landed property." " And lam sorry, i
Tom, to tell you that it s groundless."
If you wish success in life, !flake Perseverance your bosom
friend; Experience your wise counsellor; Caution your
elder brother ; and Hope your guardian genius.
Prayer is the silence of the soul, the calm of the passions,
the contentment of desire, and the union of our will with the
Divine.

What we have done is worthy of nothing but silence and
forgetfulness; but what God .has done for us is worthy of
everlasting and thankful memory.
-

Riches. honour, and pleasure are the sweets which destroy
the mind's appetite for its heavenly food ; poverty, disgrace,
and pain, are the bitters which restore it.
Alexander Gun, an excise officer, being lately dismissed
from his employment for misconduct, an entry was made in
a book, kept for the purpose, as follows :—" A Gun dis-
charged for making a false report."

A. FRENCH BULL.—The Commerce publishes the following
extract from M. Jacqueminot's address to the electors of
Paris :—" Gentlemen, I have shed all my blood for my coun-
try, and I am ready to shed it again."
A shock of an earthquake was felt on the evening of the
21st ult., at St. Anbin, Suages, and Vaumarcus (Switzerland).
It was sufficiently violent to alarm the inhabitants, several of
whom were attacked with violent headaches immediately
afterwards.

Au elderly gentleman travelling in a stage coach was
amused by the constant fire of words kept up between two
ladies. One of them at last kindly inquired if their conver-
sation did not make his head ache ?—to which he replied,
" no, ma'am ; I have been married twenty-eight years."
A landlord threatened a
In, poor Irishman, the other day, to
put a distress in his house if he did not pay his rent.—" Put
a distress n, is it you mane ?" said Pat ; " Och, by St.
Anthony's sow, but you had better take distress out, here's
too much in already, by the mither that bore me !"
The works on the Paris and Tours railroad have begun in
the department of the Loir-et Cher. Last week 50 wormen
commenced operations in the comm. rine of Onzaia, where a
great number of landowners have accepted the terms offered
by the Government.
LACONIC CORRESPONDRNCE.—We find the following cor-
respondence in a southern paper :—Dear Son,—Come home ;
a rolling stone gathersinoamoss.---T
—ix), Muggins." To which
be replied :—" Dear
jlt mirna,—Come to Texas ; a setting
"—American Paper.
hen never gets fat.— 0 n Muggins.
We understand, that Lieut.-GeneralSir Maurice Charles
O'Connell, K.C. H., commanding the forces in New South
Wales, is to succeed to the colonteelcLof the 81 regiment, va-
cant by the decease of the 1a mut--General Sir John
lady who made preten-
sions ServiceT Gazette.
y A
went to her botcher,, to re-
monstrate TENDER-HEARTED JJAD •
sions to the most refined
feelings
with him on his cruel practices. little ." said
she, " can you be so barbarous as to put
' id the butcher,innocent lambs
"you
to death ?"y " Why not, madam,' s%
would not eat them alive, would you ?'
In the county of Carmarthen, several 'Whigs have come
over to the Conservative ranks, and enrolled their names as
supporters of Mr. Saunders Davies, as yet the only conch-
who have left
candi-
date. It is stated that one of the gentlemen .
the " Reform" party recently declared that " it was no longer
respectable to be a Whig."
REMEDY FOR CHILBLAINS.—A common remedy for chil-
blains among the peasants in Russia is the rind of perfectly
ripe cucumbrs, dried with the soft parts attached, and placed
with the inner side, previously soaked in warm water, over
the sore parts. Dmitriefsky confirms the efficacy of this re-
medy.—Annals of Chemistry.
The following caution is published in a local paper :—" To
Dorcas and Provident Societies.—Ladies ! Though you can-
not command what the poor shall buy, you can control what
shall be sold at your rooms. Do not permit any calico pina-
fores or skirts—those tinder coverings for burning children—
to be sold; but sell wow:en skirts !—Perbaps you may re-
ceive some useful hints from the Polytechnic Society."

Give no entertainment to the beginnings, the first motions,
vmd secret whispers of the spirit of impurity. For if you
otally suppress it, it dies; if you permit the furnace to
breathe its smoke and flame out of any vent, it will rage to
the consumption of the whole. This cockatrice is soonest
trashed in the shell ; but if it crows, it turns to a serpent;
and a dragon, and a devil.