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1842.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1841, by CAREY AND HART, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

C. Sherman & Co. Printers,

19 St. James Street.

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WILSON'S MISCELLANIES.

WINTER RHAPSODY.

(Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1831.)

A MYRIAD-MINDED vision of winter comes, breathing, frost-work-like, over the mirror of our imagination! And who knows but that the words which give it a second being-words seeming to be things, and things thoughtsafter all that evanescent imagery has relapsed into nothing, may prove a prose-poem, in which the lover of nature may behold some of her most beautiful and sublimest forms, fixed permanently before his gaze-that mental gaze, which, when the bodily eye is shut, or its range limited, continues to behold all creation in boundles reveries and dreams, lying beneath a sweeter or a more sullen light than ever fell from a material sun over a material world?

A prose-poem! The builders of the lofty rhyme are now contented to look back, through the vista of years, on the enduring edifices their genius constructed in its primesome are old and some dead-the right hands of all the living have either forgot their cunning, are idle in the joy of glory achieved, or are loath to essay other works,

"Lest aught else great might stamp them mortal.”

Some hands may have been chilled-almost palsied by doubt-despondency-or "hope deferred, that maketh the heart sick," and they who own them, number themselves no more among the Muses' sons. The cares and duties

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of life have won away others from the charms of song; and haply one or two there be, in whom strange and cureless sorrows have dimmed and deadened

"The vision and the faculty divine!"

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Now that those deep diapasons have ceased to roll-now that no more,

through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault, The pealing anthem swells the note of praise,"

in the hush may audience be found to listen even to our humbler strains-provided they are breathed from the inspiration of a not unthoughtful heart, and obey the biddings of that sense of beauty, which is born with every creature "endowed with discourse of reason;" and when cherished by conscience, God's vicegerent here below, can clothe insensate things with the charm of life, and imbue life with a spirit that speaks of immortality!

A prose-poem! Yes-prose is poetry, whenever passion and imagination give utterance, in union and in unison, to the dreams by which they are haunted and possessed! Then from the lips of us all come

"Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn,"

and the whole "mysterious world of eye and ear” undergoes fair or glorious transfiguration.

This house of ours is a prison-this study of ours a cell. Time has laid his fetters on our feet-fetters fine as the gossamer, but strong as Samson's ribs, silken-soft to wise submission, but to vain impatience galling as cankered wound that keeps ceaselessly eating into the bone. But while our bodily feet are thus bound by an inevitable and inexorable law, lo! our mortal wings are yet free as those of the lark, the dove, or the eagle-and they shall be expanded as of yore, in calm or tempest, now touching with their tips the bosom of this dearly beloved earth, and now aspiring heavenwards, beyond the realms of mist and cloud, even unto the very core of the still heart of that otherwise unapproachable sky, which graciously opens to receive the soul on its flight, when, disencumbered of the

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