"Build me a palace wherein I may dwell." "Awake, and see it done," Spake his great voice at dawn. O miracle, That glittered in the sun! "Find me the princess fit for my embrace, The vision of my breast,-- For her search every clime and every race." My yearning arms were blessed! "Get me all knowledge." Sages with their lore, And poets with their songs, Crowded my palace halls at every door, In mute obedient throngs! "Now bring me wisdom." Long ago he went; (The cold task harder seems;) He did not hasten with the last content,-- The rest, meanwhile, were dreams! Houseless and poor, on many a trackless road, Without a guide, I found A white-haired phantom with the world his load Bending him to the ground! "I bring thee wisdom, Master." Is it he, I marvelled then, in sooth? "Thy palace-builder, beauty-seeker see!" I saw the Ghost of Youth! CINCINNATI. The French possessors of the Western country used to call the Ohio the Beautiful River; and they might well think it beautiful who came into it from the flat-shored, mountainous Mississippi, and found themselves winding about among lofty, steep, and picturesque hills, covered with foliage, and fringed at the bottom with a strip of brilliant grass. But travellers from the Atlantic States, accustomed as they are to the clear, sparkling waters and to the brimming fulness of such rivers as the James, the Delaware, and the Hudson, do not at once perceive the fitness of the old French name, _La Belle Rivière_. The water of the Ohio is yellow, and there is usually a wide slope of yellow earth on each side of the stream, from which the water has receded, and over which it will flow again at the next "rise." It is always rising or falling. As at the South the item of most interest in the newspapers is the price of cotton, and in New York the price of gold, so in the West the special duty of the news-gatherer is to keep the public advised of the depth of the rivers. The Ohio, during the rainy seasons, is forty feet deeper than it is during the dry. Between the notch which marks the lowest point to which the river has ever fallen at Cincinnati and that which records the point of its highest rise, the distance is sixty-four feet. If our Eastern rivers were capable of such vacillation as this, our large cities would go under once or twice a year.