The River Falls journal. (River Falls, Pierce County, Wis.) 1857-1861, 1858-09-29
The Atlantic MONTHLY.

With the present number of the Monthly
closes the first year Of its existence. We
hope all present subscribers viii renew
their subscriptions, and may new ones be
added. We furnish it to all our subscri-
bers at the low price of two dollars a year.
The present number for variety, for
strength and sterling worth, has not been
surpassed. The saddest feature in the
present number is the leave-taking of the
/" Autocrat Of the Breakfast Table" By
his humor, his fancies, his genuine, down.
right earnestness and truth, he has made
hosts Of friends who part with him with
regret. But there is comfort in the assu-
rance he gives us that his friend the Poet,
or his friend the Philosopher, viii soon
take his empty chair. We print an ex-
tract from his last article, the genuine
pathos and bitter truth Of which is sell
dom equalled:-
"The great mystery of Gods provi-
dence is the permitted crushing out Of
Towering instincts. Life is maintained
by the respiration of oxygen and of SEN
timents. In the long catalogue Of scien-
tific crueltes there is hardly anything
quite so painful to think of as that exper-
iment putting an animal under the bell
of an air-pump and exhausting the air
from it. I never saw the accursed trick
performed. Laus Deol There comes
time when the souls of human beings,
women, perhaps, more even than men
begin to faint for the atmosphere Of the
affections they were made to BREATHE
Then it is that Society places its trans
parent beIl-glass over the young woman
who is to be the subject Of one of its fatal
experiments. The element by which on
" the heart lives is sucked out of her
chrystaline prison. Watch her through
its transparent walls;-her bosom heav-
ing; but it is in vacuum. Death is no
riddle compared to this. I remember q
poor girls story IN the Book of Martyrs
The dry pan and the gradual fire were
the images that frightened her most
How many have withered and wasted I'M
der as slow torment in the walls of that
larger Inquisition which we call Ciyiliza-
ton.
".Yos, my surface thought laughs al
you,-you foolish, plain, oyer-dresscd,
lnincing, cheaply-organized, selfsatura-
ted young pelson, whoever you may be,
now reading this-little thinking you are
what describe, and in blissful uncon-
ciousness that you are destined to the lin
gering asphyxia ofsoul which is the lot
of such multitsdes better than yourself.
But it is only my surface thought that
laughs. For that great procession Of the
UNLovED, who not only wear the crown
Of tllorns, but must hide il uader locks
Of brown or gray,-nnder the snowy cap,
under the chilling turban,-hide it even
from neutrality-suspicious. never know
they wear it, though it kills them,
is no depth of tenderness in mr. nature
that Pity has not sounded. Somewhere,
somewhere love is in store orthem.
the universe must not be allowed to
fool thea so cruelty What infinite pa
thos in the small, half-unconseious artifi-
ces by which una.tractive young persons
seek to recommend themselves to the ia
vor of those towards whom our dear sis
teIs, the unloved, like the rest, are impell
ed by their God-given instincts
"Read what the singing-women,-one
to ten thousand Of the suffering women
tell us, and think ofthe grieiS that die I'M
spoken. Nature is in earnest when she
makes woman: and there are women
enough in the next churchy ard with very
common blue slate-stones at their head
and feet, for whom it was just as true that
sail sounds of life assumed one tone of
love-" as for Letitia Landon of whom
Elizabeth Browning said it; but she gave
words to hes grief, and they could not
SIoan's Ointment. We publish