And now again all is still. Let us pause a moment and look around. The well-known landmarks of the scene have disappeared, giving place to an unbroken prospect of the purest white. We seem to have entered into a new world, and to have lost by the transition all our old and more selfish feelings, so that now, every emotion of our heart is softened down to a gentle calm, in unison with the beauty and repose around us. There is a dreaminess in the landscape, thus half seen by the light of the moon, giving full play to the imagination. The spirit spurns this mortal tenement of clay, and soars upwards to a brighter world, holding fancied communion with the myriads of beatified spirits, which it would fain believe, hover in the air and whisper unseen into our souls. Glorious thought, that God hath appointed such guardian watchers over a lost and sinful race! We would not surrender this belief—wild and visionary as it may seem to some—for all that sectarians have asserted or atheists denied. We love, in the still watches of the night, to think that the “loved and lost” are communing with our hearts—that though dead they yet live, and watch, as of old, over our erring path—that they soothe us in sorrow, hover around our beds of sickness, are the first to bear the parted soul upwards to the gates of Paradise—and that the angelic sounds we hear upon the midnight air, coming we know not whither, but seeming to pervade the whole firmament as with a celestial harmony, are but their songs of praise. Or may not these heavenly strains be the cadences which faintly float, far down from the battlements of heaven? “Oft in bands While they keep watch, or nightly rounding walk, With heavenly touch of instrumental sounds In full harmonic numbers joined, their songs Divide the night, and lift our thoughts to Heaven.” The dream grows dim, the illusion is fading, our rhapsody dies upon our lips. We hear again thy voice—Hebe of our heart!—and we may not longer tarry in the night air. And so farewell! * * * * * APOSTROPHE. BY ALBERT PIKE. Oh Liberty! thou child of many hopes, Nursed in the cradle of the human heart! While Europe in her glimmering darkness gropes, Do not from us, thy chosen ones, depart! Still be to us, as thou hast been, and art, The Spirit which we breathe! Oh, teach us still Thy arrowy truths unquailingly to dart, Until the Tyrant and Oppressor reel, And Despotism trembles at thy thunder-peal.