“Ah, Mary! if only my dream-opera could play on through life, uninterrupted by the coarser or commoner cares of every-day existence—if the charm of that music, inaudible to others, to which, when I am let alone, my spirit moves, gliding or dancing as the measure chances to be swift or slow, might not be broken by the discord of reality, how light would float the fairy hours, led by that weird and wondrous melody, from ‘night to morn, from morn till dewy eve.’ But often, just in the midst of my heroine’s most impassioned reply to my hero—the bell rings for dinner—or our little Lily-belle wants her robe arranged—or rosy, roguish Mary insists upon playing that she is my mamma and that I am her youngest and naughtiest responsibility; and, after all, the glee that our three loving hearts play and sing together, with now and then a coo from the cradle from our little dove, our precious ‘Picciola,’ as an accompaniment—if less ethereal—less artistic—is quite as sweet and more spirited than the dream-music that Fancy plays in the air for me. To be sure, I have to be punished and put in the corner by my little tyrant, rather oftener than is convenient or agreeable, and to spell hard words, that I eschewed in my vagrant school-days some—forty years ago!—if we count time by ‘heart-throbs,’ as Festus bids us, I have lived longer than that— “I broke that chain of thought, attracted by the peculiar grace of a compliment paid by a gentleman to a very lovely woman, who is sitting near me, bending a pair of superb Spanish eyes and a graceful Psyche-head over a suspender, on which, beneath her fairy hands a wreath of exquisitely delicate flowers is growing and glowing; all too daintily for the heart it is meant to chain—since that heart is man’s— For still the fairest, frailest flowers He soonest casts aside! But the compliment. Some one remarked, that her head would be perfect, were it not that the organ of reverence was entirely wanting in it. ‘It has never been brought into play,’ was the reply, ‘for she has found _no superior_ on earth.’ “Last night, as I watched her pensive look, I found myself chanting to myself a song to her lost child—the most divinely beautiful being that I ever beheld. I loved her as my own, and the tears still spring to my eyes whenever I think of her. Will you hear the song, Mary? TO LITTLE ANNIE C——. Thy dark eyes danced in light, And on thy cheek the while, Life’s morning, rosy bright, Annie, Did softly glow and smile. A rare and radiant grace, A beauty not of earth, Had ‘o’erinformed’ thy face, Annie! God’s darling! from thy birth. When last I pressed thy brow, There dawned thy soul divine; But Heaven has won thee now, Annie! A lovelier morn is thine!