rian, that commenced his work before the frozen germ of New-England drifted into the dead of December in the cup of a May Flower! What Goth or Vandal migrated from the Old World to the New?

Dig a ditch, and you cut the untrimmed leaves of the Archives of the World. Climb a hill, and in undulating plains, and swelling heights, and deepgraved vales, the prospect reveals the basso relievo of ocean; the sculpture of billows that died, time out of mind, along sands; sands that turned to stone; stone that was hewn into temples; temples that mouldered to dust; dust that was flung to the winds; winds that swelled the sails of the Argonauts. And the SCULPTURE? The Sculpture is there still!

By the evidence of three pickaxes and a shovel, there is something in the earth, besides sassafras and silver, ginseng and gold. Now, Poetry is a great deal more like "Roots and Herbs" than people generally suppose, perhaps. Every verb has a root, and verbs are the great staple in epic poetry, for the action— that's the Verb" the play's the thing :" so the Iliad is as full of roots as a potato patch. It will not seem so very strange then, that Poetry has been digged from the earth with a shovel; poetry that Homer never matched-and when one has said Homer, he

has said all; and there it stands yet, a solitary line, and not a couplet. A line expressed by the human hand; a thought at whose utterance the tongue faltered and the pen failed; and this was the sentiment: Let the gray ATLANTIC wed the wave of blue ERIE. And this was all; but little as it was, Alexandrian Libraries could not contain its full expression. The proud Doge of Venice takes the Adriatic Sea to be his bride, and drops into her bosom, a rich gold ring in token; but here was a greater thought waiting utterance. Aye, waiting utterance! for though the Orator had rounded it into his periods, and the Bard had sung of it, they had not spoken it: it was not sung! The linen from a thousand looms could not make a sheet broad enough for its record; the press was not built that could print it; and so its Author wrote it-that one line-across the broad breast of the "Empire State." Wrote it with spade and mattock; blasted it out with powder; lifted it out with crowbars. Then, idle rills that did nothing but sparkle and run, were woven into a strong, broad strand--a crystal tie-and flung like a ribbon, from Erie to the Main! Noble "decoration" for the breast of New-York!

Ho-that Author-had carved out a River. He

had woven its waters of the skeins of brooks. He had wedded the twain. He had conceived and uttered a thought. And there it was, in one great, glorious line, of a poem yet to be completed, when some Milton, gifted with the eloquence of the hand, shall spurn the cradle of some coming Age.

Is it any less a line, that it was traced upon the green and golden scroll of the globe? Any less a sentiment, that it was uttered with a shovel? And he, CLINTON! is he not as much an author, as if, occupying an apartment walled in with learned nonsense, he had written upon "superfine satin post?"

Ah! if the Babel-cleft world ever claim a common tongue, and own a common kindred, it will be when the SAXON HAND shall forge a great dialect, needing neither lexicographer nor lexicon, "known and read of all men.' A language that has ringing hammers and jarring wheels, rustling fields and harvest songs, for accents. When the sweet Ionic of the Golden Age shall no longer stand unrivalled, and man shall hail "my brother!" around the globe, uttered in the real, living eloquence of the Educated Hand.

Digging a line of poetry, indeed! They shall shovel out whole cantos from rich loam; they-every body

shall carve out beauty from rock; forge beati tudes' in furnaces; sow hopes in fallow fields, and reap joys in harvest.

Railway Magic.

EVERY day the whistle, ring and jar, that grand trio of the Age, before which old Minstrelsy is dumb, come to us over Clear Lake and through the woods, from the M. S. and N. I. R. R.-as many initials as Garrick made faces-a whole Alphabet-TRAIN. It's a luxury that costs nothing-the chime of a mighty chronometer we hear the beat of great pendulums swinging through their iron arcs, East and West, Toledo and Chicago, here and there; ticking hours by the triplet all the day long. We set the clock by the shrill whistle of the iron boatswain, as he pipes 'all aboard" at La Porte, and catch ourselves looking n the clear sky for a cloud, when the iron-bound thunder rolls along the rails

There are a thousand things that every body sees, and no body thinks of; witchery, if you will have it so; wonders, whether you will or not. No more potent Charmer ever dwelt in "the drowsy East," than

and

of a

DISTANCE, and especially if it has MOTION for maid. Its enchantments are not merely tho Costumer, draping mountains in azure, and "such like."

A wave of its wand, and presto, magical changes are wrought, that would have kept that incorrigible Sultan-if he was a Sultan-a "thousand and one nights" longer, with the hearing.

Did you ever creep gingerly-should there be another "ly" to the gingerly?-up to the deck of a Railway Car, when the train was moving, say twenty-five or thirty miles an hour? And did you look away on, beyond the Train, where the two iron barsthat noblest couplet in the great epic of the time— were welded lovingly together, without hammer, or furnace, or fire, but just beneath the wonderful, invisible fingers of Distance, till they lay there, a huge V upon the bosom of the Prairie? And how marvellously, as the Train moved on, those stubborn bars swayed round to a parallel; as lightly and noiselessly as a brace of sunbeams, flung from a mirror swinging in the wanton wind, sweep round in the blue air? And did you "mind"—not a spike wrenched from its good hold, not a tie un-tied, not a timber splintered? There must be a charm in those fingers indeed.