"I want to go home!" saith the weary soul, Ever earnest thus 'tis praying; It weepeth a tear--heaveth a sigh-- And upward glanceth with streaming eye To its promised rest, still saying-- "I want to go home!" THE HUMBLING OF A FAIRY. BY G. G. FOSTER. The Princess Dewbell was confessed to be the queen of the ball, notwithstanding that the beauty and grace and wit of the whole realm were there, for it was the birth-night festival of the fairy princess, and her royal father, with all a parent's fond pride, had exhausted invention, and impoverished extravagance, to give _éclat_ to the occasion. The walls of his ancestral palace were sparkled all over with dew-drops, which a troop of early bees had spent all the summer mornings in collecting and preserving in the royal patent dew-preserver, invented by one of the native geniuses of the realm. These brilliant mirrors, flashing in the light of ten thousand fire-flies of the royal household, whose whole lives had been expended in learning how to carry their dainty lamps about so as to produce the finest effects, reflected the forms of the ladies and the dazzling military trappings of the handsome cavaliers, (there was war at that time between the glorious empire of Fairydom and the weak and infatuated republic of Elfland on its southern borders, and the epaulette and spurs were the only pass to the hearts of the fair,) imbuing them with an infinitude of prismatic hues, all softened into a kind of timed starlight, exquisite as the dying voice of music. In this gorgeous saloon, at the head of which sat, well pleased, the benevolent old King Paterflor and his modest and still lovely queen Sweetbine, all were noble and accomplished and beautiful and gay; but the charms of the Princess Dewbell, just bursting into the richness of full-grown fairyhood, were so surpassing that none had ever been found to question, even in their own hearts, her supremacy. This, perhaps, may appear strange to many of my pretty readers, but they must remember that mine is a faithful chronicle of fairies--not of women. The princess was standing lightly touching--it could not be said that she leaned against--the slender stalk of a garden lily, that rose like an emerald column of classic mould above her lovely form, and expanded into a graceful dome of transparent and crimson-veined cornelian above her head. Her eyes were cast pensively (at the Musical Fund Hall it would have been called coquettishly) upon the ground, and ever and anon she tossed her proud head with an imperious gesture, until the streaming curls waved and parted around her cheek and neck, like vine-leaves about a marble column as the south wind creeps among them soliciting for kisses. The lady Dewbell, amid all this scene of enchantment, which spread out before and around her, as if her own loveliness had breathed it into existence, still was discontented; sad, perhaps, at the total absence of care in her bosom, and sighing