Shall I not love thee, evermore, Thou more than planet guide to me, Whose gentle light, on sea and shore, Still spoke thy true heart's constancy! Oh, be Time's changes what they will, They cannot change that sleepless thought, That tells,—that teaches of thee still, By thee, for evermore, still taught. A REMINISCENCE. BY DR. FRANCIS LIEBER. _Charleston, S. C. June 28—the day of Fort Moultrie—1836._ _Dear Sir_—Your favor of Richmond, June 18—the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo—reached me here, a few minutes ago. The vacations of South Carolina College have begun, and I am here waiting for a vessel to carry me to the Island of Porto Rico, whither I intend to proceed for the sake of recreation! A strange way of getting cool, you will say, to go from South Carolina to the West Indies, from degree 31 northern latitude to degree 18—it is a more formidable experiment than the process of annealing, by which glass is passed into an oven not quite so hot as the first in which it was melted. I allow, it may be strange; still I shall go. But here I am, not only without any materials or memoranda, but confined to the sofa by a _faux-pas_, which has made of me, ever since, a lame man. Now if you sum up all these items—vacations just begun, without books or papers, lame and windbound in a seaport, a voyage of considerable interest before me, for which one ought to prepare himself a little—you will own that they are as many difficulties in the way of granting your request, which otherwise it would have given me much pleasure to comply with. A lame man feels poor—helpless, much more so than a man with an injured arm. How interesting does not a young officer look with his arm in a sling; but his comrade with a crutch attracts nothing but bare, sheer pity. Limping—the mere idea of limping, makes all the difference. Has not the Prussian government {536} decided, after the wars against Napoleon, that the old law, which prohibits a cripple from officiating as priest or minister, is to be interpreted, that an individual who has lost a leg is a cripple, but if he has lost an arm only, he is not to be considered such. They thought, perhaps, of the noble Cervantes, who lost his right hand in the battle of Lepanto, and wrote his immortal Don Quixotte with the left.