TO MISS LIGHT UNDERWOOD. BY J. R. BARRICK. I have been out this lovely eve, With Nature’s self to muse, While pleasant thoughts fell gently on My heart like falling dews; And every star and every flower That gave their presence to the hour, And every voice of melody, Seemed laden with sweet thoughts of thee. I mused upon thy deep, high soul Of intellect and grace: I mused on all the loveliness Of thy fair form and face: And thy bright smile unto my dreams Came stealing like the glow that beams From sky and star, in waves of light Upon the far, dim shades of night. With every tone of moonlight sound, With every breeze of balm, With every fountain, lake and stream, So beautiful and calm, With every cloud, with every star, And every sound borne from afar, Thy voice seemed mingling with the whole, Of Music’s self the life and soul. And as I gazed up to the sky, And on the earth below, My thoughts went back a few brief months, ’Mid saddening scenes of wo: When thou wert lost in rayless night, A wanderer from the sense of sight, When Nature’s self had ceased to cheer Thy high heart with her beauty dear, I mused on the long night of wo That thou wert doomed to share, When not a hope was left to beam Upon thy dark despair: I thought how sad it was to be From earth and sky shut out like thee, To pine beneath a cloud of gloom, Hung o’er thee, like a raven’s plume. But now thou art restored again, To former sense of sight, And lookest back with fearful gaze On that remembered night: And happy in thy mind’s high powers Thou rangest Thought’s Elysian bowers, And canst behold with joyous eyes, The wide, green earth, and free blue skies. * * * * * THE CONDOR HUNT.[2] BY LIEUT. WM. F. LYNCH. In each division of the American Continent, nature seems to have carried on her operations with boundless magnificence, and upon a gigantic scale. Chateaubriand, reclining by his watch-fire on the banks of the Niagara, where the thunders of its cataract were only interrupted by the startling yell of the Iroquois, could yet _feel_, in the midst of tumult, the amazing silence and solitude of the North American forest. And the hardy mariner, whose bark has escaped the perils of the Southern sea, and is wafted along the western coast of Chili, looks with no less admiration upon the fertile plains gradually receding into the swell of the Andes, which literally lifts its smoking craters and towering eminences above the clouds, and upon its snow-capped and sunny summits, scarcely feels the undulations of the storms which gather and burst around its waist.