One hundred and sixty-five avenues have been discovered in Mammoth Cave, the walk through which is estimated at about three hundred miles. In some places, you descend more than a mile into the bowels of the earth. The poetic-minded traveller, after he has traced all the labyrinths, departs with lingering reluctance. As he approaches the entrance, daylight greets him with new and startling beauty. If the sun shines on the verdant sloping hill, and the waving trees, seen through the arch, they seem like fluid gold; if mere daylight rests upon them, they resemble molten silver. This remarkable richness of appearance is doubtless owing to the contrast with the thick darkness, to which the eye has been so long accustomed. As you come out of the cave, the temperature of the air rises thirty degrees instantly (if the season is summer), and you feel as if plunged in a hot vapor bath; but the effects of this are salutary and not unpleasant. Nature never seems so miraculous as it does when you emerge from this hidden realm of marvellous imitations. The "dear goddess" is so serene in her resplendent and more harmonious beauty! The gorgeous amphitheatre of trees, the hills, the sky, and the air, all seem to wear a veil of transfigured glory. The traveller feels that he was never before conscious how beautiful a phenomenon is the sunlight, how magnificent the blue arch of heaven! There are three guides at the service of travellers, all well versed in the intricate paths of this nether world. Stephen, the presiding genius of Mammoth Cave, is a mulatto, and a slave. He has lived in this strange region from boyhood, and a large proportion of the discoveries are the result of his courage, intelligence, and untiring zeal. His vocation has brought him into contact with many intellectual and scientific men, and a prodigious memory, he has profited much by intercourse with superior minds. He can recollect every body that ever visited the cave, and all the terms of geology and mineralogy are at his tongue's end. He is extremely attentive, and peculiarly polite to ladies. Like most of his race, he is fond of grandiloquent language, and his rapturous expressions, as he lights up some fine point of view, are at times fine specimens of glorification. His knowledge of the place is ample and accurate, and he is altogether an extremely useful and agreeable guide. FOOTNOTES: [B] See engraving of this hotel in the _International_ for August, 1851. THE POEM OF THE MONTH. The finest new poem that has fallen under our notice is the following, from _Graham's Magazine_ for the present month. We think few who have read Miss Carey's recent poems entitled _Lyra_, _Jessie Carol_, _October_, and _The Winds_, with her prose volume just published by Redfield, will be disposed to question, that in the brief period in which she has been before the public she has entitled herself to the highest rank among the living literary women of the United States. WINTER, BY ALICE CAREY.