She sits alone, with folded hands, While from her full and lustrous eyes Imperial light wakes love to life,-- Love that, unheeded, quickly dies. She sits alone, among them all So near, and yet so far,--they seem But our coarse waking thoughts, while she Is the reflection of a dream. She sits alone, so still, so calm, So queenly in her grand repose, You wish that Love would slap her cheeks And make the white a blush-red rose! * * * * * LITERARY NOTICES. CHEAP COTTON BY FREE LABOR. By a Cotton Manufacturer. Second edition. Boston: A. Williams & Company, 100 Washington Street. 1861. Price 12 cents. It seldom happens that we find so many weighty facts within so short a compass as are given in this pamphlet. For many years the assertion that only the negro, and the negro as a slave, could be profitably employed in raising cotton in America, has been accepted most implicitly by the whole country, and this has been the great basis of pro-slavery argument. But of late years, doubt has been thrown, from time to time, on this assumption, and in the little work before us there is given an array of concise statements, which, until their absolute falsehood is proved, must be regarded as conclusive of the fact, that the white man is _better_ adapted than the negro to labor at the cultivation of cotton. Our 'cotton manufacturer' begins properly by bursting the enormous bubble of the failure of free labor in the British West Indies; showing, what is too little known, that the decrease in the export of sugar from Jamaica began and rapidly continued for thirty years before the emancipation of slaves, but has _since_ been well-nigh arrested. With this decrease of export the _import of food has decreased, although the population, has increased_; but, at the present day, the aggregate value of the exports of _all_ the British West Indies is now nearly as great as it was in the palmiest days of slavery, while on an average the free blacks now earn far more for themselves than they formerly did for their masters, and are therefore 'better off.' Even those who regard the negro, whether a slave or free, as fulfilling his whole earthly mission in proportion to the profit which he yields Lancashire spinners, have no just grounds of complaint. But as regards the United States, there are certain facts to be considered. According to the census of 1850, there were in our slave States, 'where it is frequently asserted that white men can not labor in the fields,' eight hundred thousand free whites over fifteen years of age employed exclusively in agriculture, and over one million exclusively in out-door labor. Again, wherever the free-white labor and small-farm system of growing cotton has been tried, it has invariably proved more productive than that of employing slaves. It can not be denied that, deducting the expense of maintaining decrepit