is one of the most spacious and sumptuous
mansions in town. It is just furnished in
the highest style of the present mode. The
drawing-room comprises a most attractive
assemblage of the Greek and Chinese." A remarkable
and bewildering combination, this "assemblage,"
the colours brought together in our
young lady's boudoir being, as she informs us,
"pea-green and pale rose-colour."

Dress naturally occupies a great share in
these letters. There is a beautiful countess
who comes to stay in the house, and who indulges
continually in the most gorgeous and
ever-new toilettes. This lady supplies matter
for the elegant letter-writer, who is very
minute and perhaps a little spiteful in her
manner of describing the different articles which
go to make up the countess's costume. These
letters contain a strange jumble. At the end of
each there is appended a little literary intelligence
—some announcement of new books about
to appear, or an intimation that the writer has
forwarded to her friend, along with the fashion-
prints, some work in which she herself has been
lately revelling. She speaks of forwarding, in
her next packet, Gleanings from Zimmerman's
Solitude, and describes the work as a "care-
soothing and amiable little production;" while
in another place she announces some novel
productions by the "ingenious" Miss Porter,
asking her friend, "who can but look forward
with pleasurable expectation to any forthcoming
work from the authors of Thaddeus of Warsaw
and the Hungarian Brothers?"

Here, then, roughly sketched—the main
points alone insisted on, and only some of
those, lest the reader's patience should weary—
is a brief abstract of the contents of an average
serial magazine of light literature, published
during the early part of this present century.
Here is a link in the chain which connects the
Tatler, the Spectator, and the Rambler with the
periodical literature of our own day. The link
is a flimsy one, made of pewter or pinchbeck
at best. It will not bear any severe kind
of testing, or to be dealt with at all roughly;
but still it is a link, and as such not to be
altogether ignored. It is melancholy to think that
those fine works mentioned above should have
had such a successor. The decline of any art,
indeed, is always a melancholy fact to
contemplate. When a thing once well done,
instead of advancing and getting to be better
done, goes back, and is done very much worse
than it was before, it must always—in a world
of which progress is the first law—be painful
and unnatural. Yet these temporary declines—
chiefly because they are temporary—are not
really discouraging. When La Belle Assemblée
flourished, everything connected with matters
of taste was at its worst. Was anything—one
is tempted to ask—done well in 1809? In what
a condition was art, costume, public taste,
as manifested in the buildings erected at that
time, and in all things decorative of whatever
kind! The literature of La Belle Assemblée
was no exception to the general weakness and
bad taste of them all.

Yet art, and literature, and taste have
survived. They were not really dead. It is truer
to say that they slept, and have awakened
again.

WOODLAND MUSIC.

WHAT saith the hum of the woodlands,
The undertone of the air?
Can fancy understand it,
Or human words declare?
Mine can; at least, I dream so,
As I listen and compare.

The trees, from leaves and branches,
All seem to whisper and sigh,
As lovers might to lovers,
Under the moonlit sky,
As passionate and foolish—
Letting the world go by.

The grass to the grass makes music,
As the wind in its current rolls,
The sedges sigh to the willows,
The flower with the flower condoles,
Each in its little circle,
As if they were human souls.

The tiniest life in the sunbeam
In the pebble's caverns dark,
In the ripple of the shallows,
Where a straw may be an ark,—
In the shelter of the mosses,
In the crinkles of the bark,

In every pulse and movement
Of Nature's mighty breath,
Enacts for ever and ever
The tale of Life and Death—
Of Hope, and Struggle, and Effort,
Of Life, and Love, and Death.

There's war among the myriads,
That flutter, and float, and crawl,—
There's cruelty, and bloodshed,
And agony 'mid them all—
The strong consuming the feeble,
The large oppressing the small.

In their little world they suffer,
As man in his larger sphere;
Yet not, in God's great bounty,
Without some blessings clear,
And the kindly compensations
That balance a fate severe.

Their voices, though we hear not,
Keep time to the tune of spring;
The bee in the rose is happy,
And the moth upon the wing;
And the worm has as much enjoyment
As the birds that soar and sing.

Ay, here in this breezy woodland,
Under the bright blue sky,