'If Love, red Love, with tears and joy; if Want, with his scourge; if War, with his cannonade; if Christianity, with its charity; if Trade, with its money; if Art, with its portfolios; if Science, with her telegraphs through the deeps of space and time, can set man's dull nerves throbbing, and, by loud taps on the tough chrysalis, can break its walls and let the new creature emerge erect and free,--make way and sing paean! The age of the quadruped is to go out--the age of the brain and the heart is to come in. The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized. Man's culture can spare nothing, wants all the material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power. The formidable mischief will only make the more useful slave. And if one shall read the future of the race hinted in the organic effort of Nature to mount and meliorate, and the corresponding impulse to the Better in the human being, we shall dare affirm that there is nothing he will not overcome and convert, until at last culture shall absorb the chaos and gehenna. He will convert the Furies into Muses, and the hells into benefit.' SPHINX AND OEDIPUS. Why poets should sing of this WAR In rapturous anthems of praise, I know not. Its meanings so jar, Its purpose hath so many ways, The SPHINX never readeth the whole. 'Tis a riddle propounded to me That I am unskillful to tell. The Sphinx by the way-side, I see, Is watching (I know her so well) To mangle us, body and soul. Is it 'Freedom, that Bondage may live,' Which cheers on the North to the fray? Is it 'Slavery more Freedom to give,' That slogans the Southern foray? She asks, and awaits your reply: Now answer, ye _marshal_-bred bands Whose business is murder and blood; Ye priests with incarnadined hands; Ye peace-men who 'fight for the good;' Now solve her this riddle or die! 'Our Flag,' the conservative says, 'Waves over the land of the free;' God save us!--I think many ways, But still 'tis a riddle to me, Whose mystery is hid from the eye; But Oedipus, showing the souls All fettered, imbruted and blained, Who point where its blazonry rolls, And wail the sad plaint of the chained,-- Asserts, 'There is, somewhere, a lie.' THE ACTRESS WIFE.