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THE COURANT; A SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL. 79
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SINGULAR COINCIDENCE.
To the Editors of the Evening Post:
It is a very easy matter to accuse a man of plagiarism--es-
pecially a poet. To thrust such a charge upon the charming
"Professor of the Breakfast Table," the man who has told us
so much of men and things, in such an artistic, and yet such a
natural way, is, to say the least, a very disagreeable thing.
While I shall not do it in the present instance, I shall exhibit,
for the entertainment of yoru readers, a very wonderful instance
of the way in which men happen to stumble upon similar modes
of thought and expression.
At the conclusion of the Professor's last paper, in the Atlan-
tic Monthly for June, you will find the following little poem,
entitled "The Two Streams:"
Behold the rocky wall,
That down its sloping sides
Pours the swift rain-drops, blending as they fall,
In rushing river tides!

Yon stream, whose sources run,
Turned by a pebble's edge,
Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun
Through the cleft mountain-ledge.

The slender rill had strayed,
But for the slanting stone,
To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid
Of foam-flecked Oregon.

So from the heights of Will
Life's parting stream descends,
And, as a moment turns its slender rill,
Each widening torrent bends--

From the same cradle's side,
From the same mother's knee--
One to long darkness and the frozen tide,
One to the Peaceful Sea!

Now this poem is very beautiful, and will, doutbless, elicit
the admiration of the Professor's numerous friends; yet I de-
sire to submit to your readers, without further comment, a
short abstract from a Baccalaureate sermon, preached by Rev.
Dr. Hopkins, of William's College, August 3, 1856. After a
reference to the elementary qualifications which constitute a
hero--a Christian hero--there occurs this passage:
"Not more surely does the tree come to its flowering and its
fruitage, than man comes to freedom of choice, intelligent
action, moral responsibility, and through these to that moment
of decisive and governing choice, which shall control his pro-
fessional career here, to that which shall give direction to
the current of his moral life forever. At this point, the set of
the current may be undecided. It may be as water on the sum-
mit of the Andes. A pebble, the finger of a child, may turn it;
but that moment decides whether it shall mingle with the stormy At-
lantic, or rest and glitter on the bosom of the broad Pacific.
"You, my beloved friends of the Graduating Class, stand to-
day, upon the summit of a moral Andes. It overlooks, on
either hand, the plains you are to traverse, and the ocean you
are to sail. Not as drops of water are you impelled by a necessi-
tating force; but with the comprehension of reason, with the
responsibilities of freedom, with the advantages of education,
in the freshness of opening manhood, you are to decide whether
you will tend towards that dark and troubled sea, which cannot
rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt, or towards that bright
and peaceful ocean, where sleep the isles of the blest."
Oswego, May 25, 1859. NOMLA.
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A NOVELTY IN MUSIC AND MECHANICS.--Every pianoforte
amateur has longed for some supernatural agency which should
note down and preserve a record of the sounds which he calls
forth from his instrument when the divine afflatus is on him,
and the spirit of melody takes possession of his brain. To
adopt a more chaste style of rhetoric, every player improvises
some strains which he would be glad to repeat, which, perhaps,
contain some ideas worthy of further development, but which
once played, cannot be recalled, and are lost. Mr. Henry F.
Bond has invented a beautifully simple apparatus, which is
easily to be applied to any pianoforte, and by which every note
played, whether by design or accident, is recorded in its pro-
per place upon a slip of music paper. In a few words, the
plan of this apparatus may be thus described:
Upon a cylinder placed in one end of the pianoforte, the
ruled music paper is wound, by means of clock work, this cyl-
inder is made to revolve, at a unifrom rate of speed; the
paper thus unwound, passes by another cylinder prepared with
a surface of ink; each key of the instrument, acting upon a
lever, raises a metal point against the paper, presses it upon
the inky surface, and causes a mark to be made, the length of
the mark showing accurately the duration of the note. A
pedal, by a similar action, marks the bars. With five minutes
of practice, any person who understands the music can rapidly
translate these marks into the usual system of notes. The
whole arrangement is so simple that the first feeling is aston-
ishment that the invention has never been born before.--Bos-
ton Courier,
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The London Athenæum, which rarely speaks well of an Am-
erican work, has a long and genial notice of "The Convales-
cent," by N. P. Willis. We copy the opening sentence:
The last time we met Mr. Willis was in the mazes of a senti-
mental American art-novel, which was neither very merry nor
very wise. How pleasant it is to encounter him as having come
forth from the labyrinth, we need not tell. This parlor-window
(or arbor-door) book of his is as much to our liking as its pre-
decessor was the contrary. Mannered, no doubt, it is; but
the mannerism of Mr. Willis has mellowed, if not simplified it-
self. The influences of time, sickness, country-life, are to be
traced in these pages. The heart that never wanted in good-
nature has gained in wisdom. There is an afternoon-tone about
the book,--not that of the land (dear to all lovers of Indolence,)
--where it was always afternoon,
but something sobered--not therefore dull,--quiet--not for that
drowsy;--and though it be merely, like many of Mr. Willis'
books, a collection of scattered papers, it may, and we think
it should, live among the miscellanies which (to return) we are
glad to take up in the parlor-window or at the arbor-door.
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"THE PRINTER WHO KNEW JUNIUS."
The Southern Citizen pronounces its opinion about the "prin-
ter" aforesaid and "Junius" in this wise:
"Finding this trash in all our exchanges, we think it right
to say, it is impossible that any person should have known Ju-
nius. Also, it is not true that any printer, or other person,
was ever expelled from England for printing the letters of Ju-
nius. However, if a man from the other hemisphere were to
come here and say he knew Prester John, the statement would
go the round of the newspapers. There is but one man in
America or elsewhere who "knew Junius," and that not by the
bodily eye-sight but by the intuition of genius. The man lives
in East Tennessee, and has established the identity of Junius
beyond all reasonable dispute. His researches are not yet pub-
lished. When they shall be, those who take an interest in the
author of Junius (which we don't,) will be satisfied.
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For the Courant.
LEILI.
-----
BY W. H. ABNEY.
-----
Out of Al Jannât, and out
Of a weird little smile of the sky;
I dream I hear the seraphs shout--
Leili!--Leili!*

The poet who, with fire divine,
His earthly strains would purify,
Must first invoke thee in his line--
Leili!--Leili!

Thus, as I linger in thy shade,
Sweet voices, ever nigh,
In spirit-thrills, that never fade,
Whisper Leili!
--------
* Arabic for--"O Night"--"O Night."
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THE TEMPLE OF DIANA OF THE EPHESIANS.--This temple
was built, as Pliny says, on a soft foundation, to guard against
the shocks of earthquakes. The foundation, therefore, was laid
in a swamp; wool and charcoal were intersposed to absorb the
wet, and the arches form a subterranean labyrinth, in which
water stagnates; all which is so at the present day. The su-
perstructure bears all the evidence of an edifice which was de-
stroyed eight times, and took two hundred and eighty years in
building and rebuilding. It now consists of sevearl walls of
immense blocks of marble, the fronts of which are perforated
with small cavities, into which were sunk the shanks of the
brass and silver plates with which the walls were faced. In
several places where the walls have fallen, they have exposed
cornices and mouldings of a former edifice, against which the
newer walls had been built up. Some of the vast porphyry
pillars, which formed the front portico, still lie prostrate before
it; but others were brought by Constantine to his new city of
Constantinople. The heathen temple was dilapidated, to build
the Christian church of Santa Sophia, in which these pillars are
again become the great support of an anti-Christian edifice.
But the most interesting circumstance of this building to me is
the great illustration it gives to the Acts of the Apostles. Here
is the place where St. Paul excited the commotion among the
silver and brass-smiths, who worked for the temple; and over
the way was the theatre, into which the people rushed, carry-
ing with them Caius and Aristarchus, Paul's companions.
Hence they had a full view of the magnificent front of the tem-
ple, which they pointed out as that "which all Asia worship-
peth," and in their enthusiasm they cried out, "Great is Diana
of the Ephesians!" to whom such a temple belonged.--Porter.
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MARRIAGE.--In the pressure that now weighs upon all per-
sons of limited fortune, sisters, nieces, and daughters, are the
only commodities that our friends are willing to bestow upon
us for nothing, and which we cannot afford to accept, even
gratuitously. It seems to have been the same, at a former pe-
riod, in France. Maitre Jean Picard tells us that, when he was
returning from the funeral of his wife, doing his best to look
disconsolate, such of his neighbors as had grown-up daughters
and cousins came to him, and kindly implored him not to be
inconsolable, as they could give him a second wife. "Six
weeks after," says Maitre Jean, "I lost my cow, and, though
I really grieved upon this occasion, not one of them offered to
give me another." It has been recorded by some anti-connu-
bial wag, that when two widowers were once condoling to-
gether on the recent bereavement of their wives, one of them
exclaimed, with a sigh, "Well may I bewail my loss, for I had
so few differences with the dear deceased, that the last day of
my marriage was as happy as the first." "There I surpass
you," said his friend, "for the last day of mine was happier!"
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LOVER.--A man who, in his anxiety to obtain possession of
another, has lost possession of himself. Lovers are seldom
tired of one another's society, because they are always speak-
ing of themselves. Let us not, however, disparage this fond
infatuation, for all its tendences are elevating. He who has
passed through life without ever being in love, has had no
spring-time--no summer in his existence; his heart is as a
flowering plant which hath never blown--never developed it-
self--never put forth its beauty and its perfume--never given
nor received pleasure. The love of our youth, like kennel
coal, is so inflammable, that it may be kindled by almost any
match; but if its transient blaze do not pass away in smoke, its
flame, too bright and ardent to last long, soon exhausts and
consumes itself. The love of our maturer age is like coke,
which, once ignited, burns with a steady and enduring heat,
emitting neither smoke nor flame. No wonder that we hear so
much of the sorrows of love, for there is a pleasure even in
dwelling upon its pains. Revelling in tears, its fire, like that
of naphtha, likes to swim upon water.
-----------------------------------------
They tell a good story of Hallam and Rogers. The poet
said, "How do you do, Hallam?" "Do what?" "Why, how
do you find yourself?" "I never lose myself." "Well, how
have you been?" "Been--where?" "Pshaw!--how do you
feel?" "Feel of me, and see." "Good morning, Hallam."
"It's not a good morning." Rogers could say no more.
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ENLIGHTENED JOURNALISM.--The editor of the Gospel Ban-
ner, a religious paper published in Maine, visited the city of
Boston during Anniversary Week, and went to the opera, "not
as a minister, but as an editor," and for the express purpose of
seeing the "infatuation of opera-goers." He thus gives his
idea of the Italian Opera:
"The spectacle that saluted the eye before the rising of the
curtain, was a magnificent one. The whole floor was occupied
by finely dressed ladies and gentlemen, as were the three gal-
leries rising one above the other into the lofty dome, which was
brilliantly lighted. And the music of the orchestra, and now
and then a strain of the singing were fine, but the performance,
as a whole, we thought a bore. Whiskered men and painted
women, tricked out in plush and tinsel, growling and grunting
and shrieking and squalling, sometimes in solo, and then in
duett; and anon the whole swarm, like so many cats, gesticu-
lating, and menacing, and embracing, and frowning, and
going through with all sorts of antics, in a gibberish that no-
body can understand, that is the Italian Opera, as we heard
and say it. Had it not been for a few strains--of which Casta
Diva, as sung by Madame Laborde, is never to be forgotten,
and Carl Formes' bass singing,--it would have been insuffer-
able. And yet, when some performer went through with his
or her throat-splitting vocal gymnastics, it was curious to see
the audience--such being the fashion just now--go into fits of
enthusiasim. To us--and we profess not to only have an ear,
but two ears for music--a quiet seat on a mossy rock, near
some pond full of frogs, would have been quite as edfying, and
nearly as musical.
It would be interesting to know, whether, in the discussion
of religious topics, the elegant critic of the Gospel Banner dis-
plays such sparkling qualities as are shown in the above dew-
drop.--Boston Courier.
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IRISH WIT.--Irish wit is ready wit. Various phases of it
are recorded as follows by a traveler:
When I heard a grave, gentleman-like man, at the Bally-
brogue Station of the Great Punster Railway, say to a friend,
who asked him how he would spend the half-hour he would
have to wait, that he should spend it thinking of all the kind
things he (the friend) had been saying to him, I said, "The
Irish are a polite people."
When I saw, at Dublin theatre, the whole house to a man
get on their legs, and howl at the manager because he wouldn't
introduce a national jig in the middle of "La Somnambula," I
said, "The Irish are an excitable people."
When a Killarney guide swore to me on the tomb of his
grandmother that there was a small lake up in Mullacap, coun-
ty Kerry, which contained a giant eel, that swam twice round
the enclosure every day at two o'clock, with a pan of old gould
tied to his tail, I said, "The Irish are a superstitious people."
When a Tipperary landlord, in a Galway railway carriage,
told me that he was surnamed "The Woodcock," becasue he
had been shot at so often by the "noblest tinantry," and missed,
I said, "The Irish are a revengeful people."
When I saw my friend Mike Rooney's best blue breeches
stuffed into the window to keep out the rain, I said, "The
Irish are a thoughtless people.
And lastly, when I refused the beggar-woman at Castlebar a
half-penny, and she ironically hoped the "Lord would make
my bed that night in heaven," I said, "The Irish are a witty
people.
-----------------------------------------
Mrs. Stowe's idea of Aaron Burr does'nt strike the editor of
the Taunton Gazette as particularly happy. We quite agree
with the Dean. Whatever else he might have been, Burr was
no milksop. His eloquence moreover was much too subtle to
be put down in print, like the fine phrases of the Lotharios
that figure in romances. But hear the Dean:--
"In 'The Minister's Wooing,' Aaron Burr is introduced as
one who is about to play a part in the story. This is a bold
proceeding in more senses than one; for apart from that which
makes him most spoken of, he is out of the range of Mrs.
Stowe's tuition or her intuition. This is evident from the con-
versation that she draws from him, which is not above the
average phrases of a common carpet-knight; in fact, so far,
she has made his speech a mere mush of cant and compliments.
Can any one accept this as the method of Burr? His mind
was one of the most perfect and polished, as it was one of the
hardest of gems; and where its full fire fell it dazzled if it did
not blind. The power of gallantry, as Burr wielded it, is be-
queathed to no school, survives in no formula."
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WARNING TO LANDLADIES AS TO COOKERY.--We see, also, more
and more, the tendency of our bachelors, young and old, to
dine anywhere but at their lodgings. Some go to luxurious
clubs; some to boarding houses; some to chop-houses: and
some to cooks' shops of various grades. Bad cooking seems to
be both cause and effect of the growing change. An ill-cooked
dinner, repeated sufficiently often, sends the lodger elsewhere
for his chief meal; and the want of daily practice on the lodg-
er's dinner, causes the landlady to loose any skill she might
once have had. Thus is swelled the popular lamentation over
the decay of the art of cooking among the working women of Eng-
land, from the peasant's wife, who gives her household dry
bread or watery potatoes, to the great lady of the first-class
inn, who is as helpless among her own servants, as if she had
come from another planet."
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SANDWICHES ARE GETTING FASHIONABLE.--Another national
peculiarity, I noticed on this trip, seemed to be on the wane.
There is a far less liberal response to the oft-repeated cry of
the conductor, "Cars stop here five minutes for refreshments."
The unmitigated consumption of hard dough-nuts, equivocal
looking oysters, sandwiches of an uncertain epoch in the
world's history, and which would require a Rogers to deter-
mine, together with tea innocent of boiling water, and coffee,
bastard offspring of the "fragrant bean"--all this has, in a
measure, given place to the enlightenment of this age of pro-
gress, and now some dear Jemima, like mine own, perhaps, or
a taper-fingered, becrinolined and gentle sister, packs up for
the wayfarer, a package of model sandwiches, every mouthful of
which is redolent of mustard, ham, and home.
-----------------------------------------
A BIG BUTTERFLY.--Prof. Agassiz has received from Brazil
a butterly that measures ten feet from the tip of one wing to
the other.
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