the door and saw, to his surprise and terror, the Empress prostrate upon the floor. She was without sense or motion. Physicians were sent for, and consternation prevailed. All the means possible were resorted to, but without effect. She was still alive; her heart was found still to beat. Paul, her son and successor, arrived in the evening. His mother still breathed. About ten the next evening, the Empress appeared suddenly to revive, and began to rattle in the throat. The imperial family hastened to her. At FRIAR IVES AT ACRE. last she gave a lamentable shriek, and died, after having continued for thirtyseven hours in a state of insensibility. The body of the Emperor Peter i was brought from the convent and crowned, and the two coffins lay in state till they were removed to the Citadel Church of tombs for the sovereigns of Russia, where they now lie with the sovereigns of Russia, on the floor of the church, in sight of all who go there as spectators or as worshippers at that memorable historic spot. POETRY. [See Joinville's "Memoirs of St. Louis," Part II., for, this anecdote, which is quoted by Bishop Taylor in his "Great Exemplar," Part III., discourse 14th.] THE weary day is ended now, And cool night winds fan cheek and brow; With lute, and harp, and song, and shout. A thousand lamps are glitt'ring bright, The lamps of Heaven their radiance shed. Pass'd, shadow-like, from street to street, Onward, engross'd with thoughts like these, He quickly pass'd, until his feet The Sultan of Damascus had sent to King Louis, offering his alliance. Friar Ives le Breton was to return with the ambassadors, and declare the King's mind to the Sultan he was chosen for the task on account of his knowledge of Saracenic. Tread in a narrow, silent street. The fire of youth gleam'd in her eye; Though scant and mean the robe she wore. And in the left beheld the Friar A vessel fill'd with coals of fire. He gazed upon her, and would fain Have asked, "Wherefore these vessels twain ?” To his unspoken thought replies She, fixing on him her dark eyes; 666 Wherefore this water?'-mark me well! With it I'll quench the flames of hell! 666 Wherefore this fire?'-list thou and learn!The joys of Paradise to burn! That henceforth men may serve my Lord Nor fear of punishment abhorr'd: But freely yield their hearts-the whole- Is He not worthy? Brighter far The Day-spring, than yon brightest star? Chief 'mong ten thousand? fairer than Seek we a hero? Who hath stood, With bread from heav'n the hungry feeds, Our Samson, glorious, strong! betray'd! Whence streams of blood and water ran Sooner than, blind one! thou shouldst miss 'Mid toys like these, supremest bliss, Sooner than Him thus slighted see, The Lord who lived and died for me. Oh, King of Beauty, when shall I With thee, 'twere Heaven in Hell to dwell!” The Breton friar pass'd on, alone, Oh, would that we, in our cold days, From where I, on my couch, am laid, Whose memories alone remain; 'Tis summer in the country fields- And from the world the heart beguiles, Teaching us folly to despise, And, with contentment to be wise. Though here with patience nigh outworn, The music of the purling rill; To dream along the silent riverShall I e'er know such days again, Or have they fled away for ever? Oh what is learning, friendship, wealth, Deprived of Heaven's great blessing-health? In my distress, for aught unfit, May I perceive a wise design; In patience to my lot submit, My will to that of Heaven resign; And while I wish all pain removed, Let not the event pass unimproved. -Chambers's Journal. THE WORKER. "HARD is the lot of the worker, But the night must serve for weeping- High rose the houses, a great human hive, While in the stifling courts the children swarmed. A chill, gray day died blank and colorless The light was gone; From his sight The nurse, a simple neighbor, bore the babe Whose seven blithe years had brought no bitterness Between the sleeping and the dead Covered, still, and white, It lay-that awful burden-on the bed He should have shared. He did not lift the shroud Its whiteness with a tear. Beside him lay A sudden strangeness fell on all his life, The boy awoke And there he sat and loomed out of the dark That held him, and should hold him ever more. Four scorpions! which instead of cloistered death, Oh! fiend incarnate, that could urge me on, They brought me here On my young sister Isa's wedding day, Hast thou not in thee something more than these, The words are but too true; though 'tis no "leaf;" Last May I roved with her into the woods: (I at her feet), we sate. Anon there came THOS. HERBERT LEWIN. BRIEF LITERARY NOTICES. Dalziel's Illustrated Arabian Nights Entertainments. The text revised and emendated throughout, by H. W. DULCKEN, Ph. D. One hundred illustrations, by J. E. MILLAIS, R. A., A. B. Houghton, Thomas Dalziel, J. D. Watson, John Tenniel, G. J. Pinwell. Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel. London: Ward and Lock. The Arabian Nights is one of the few books which supply a boundless field of collateral yet wholly independent study by the side of the mere amusement they afford. Read as a string of idle fictions, they still remain a perennial kaleidoscope and literary wonder of elementary human emotion. As in the kaleidoscope we see elementary colors thrown, as it were, at random together, not satisfying art, but producing astonishment, so in the Arabian Nights all the elementary emotions and colors of human nature follow one another in an apparently childlike cycle of innocence, credulity, and bewonderment, yet so as to baffle old and practised eyes in any attempt to unravel the secret of the juxtaposition and obtain the key to their sequence. As the wheel revolves, and fiction follows fiction, color color, we see dove-like gentleness and astounding cruelty, romantic courage and brazen craft, apparently unconscious folly and apparently unconscious wisdom, follow one another with the same arbitrary ease, the same rotatory gravity, the same absence of the slightest clue to the moving hand guiding the colors in their course, and but for the entertainment invariably afforded to the spectator, we had almost said, the same monotony of wonderful effect. If we endeavor to overcome the dazing influence of the tales themselves, to look with a critical eye upon the sequence of the ideas, if we try to reäscend by analysis and imagination to the springs of authorship, and to reconstruct the society out of which the stories grew, we pass abruptly into another world of thoughts, and tumble at the entrance into a sea of speculation. It seems no solution of the problem to suppose that the stories were in the origin designedly composed to amuse children. If the Boy's Own Book under the same name were the only relic of our civilization three thousand years hence, the doubt whether it was written for children or not would only complicate, not simplify the problem of the reconstruction out of that book of the civilization which gave birth to it. Any floating knowledge Englishmen have of contemporary Asiatic life does not seem to throw much light upon the reconstruction of the society out of which the Arabian Nights grew. Nor need this appear strange. The original of the Arabian Nights is probably separated by quite as wide an interval from modern Asiatic life as Homer from modern Greekdom. We know infinitely more about the modern Greeks than we do about the modern Orientals, at all events we understand them infinitely better, for they stand on the same plane of civilization, that is to say, within the same focus of ideas as ourselves. All we know of modern Greek life does not of itself throw any light on the authorship of Homer, or on the state of society out of which the Homeric poems sprang. Yet the literary filiation from Homer downwards through ancient Greek literature to modern times is perhaps the most luminous instance of literary filiation on record, and there is perhaps nothing to compare with it in history except the filiation— we are here speaking of the literary and social relation-of the Bible to modern European thought. Nor does any knowledge we may have of contemporary Asiatic life seem to afford more than the most general help. In the first place, the complexity of the existing Asiatic life is immense. In the next place, it is surprising how few Eng-ed upon twenty different threads of thought?" lishmen, even after a long and intimate acquaintance with Oriental life, ever seem to have penetrated beyond the mere outward shell and husk of the Oriental character. But it is precisely the relation of the inner idea of a people to the external evolutions of that idea in literary monuments which it would be interesting to recover, and which it is impossible to recover without penetrating from the circumference of a nation's perspective to its centre. Mr. Lane indeed tells us in his learned work on the Arabian Nights that the Arab sheikhs about Cairo delight in the Arabian Nights, and are minutely familiar with them, and that they are excellent commentators with regard to the manners and customs and religious allusions, mostly, it would seem, Mahommedan-contained in them. But what does not appear is in what light the Arabian Nights affect the modern Arab reader? Is it as Homer affected the contemporaries of Homer, or the contemporaries of Pericles, or the contemporaries of Lucian? Is it as Chaucer, for instance, affected Englishmen of the days of Chaucer, or of the days of Elizabeth, or of our own day? This is clearly a necessary inquiry before we can apply contemporary Oriental life and feeling, supposing us to understand it, as a key to the exposition of the Arabian Nights. But this is only a preliminary. We ourselves know well enough what impression Chaucer's works make upon us. Yet, instead of abandoning ourselves to random impression created upon us by their lazy perusal, an impression compounded of our own modern ideas flavored by his antique language, if we set to work in earnest to reconstruct the real temper, and feeling, and thought, the internal civilization of his day upon which his poetry blossomed as a natural and necessary fruit, how difficult the task is, even for us looking straight back in the line of our own familiar growth! or traditional. If we put the Orlando Furiso, the Gierusalemme Liberata, Robinson Crusoe, and Boccaccio's tales together, and hand them down as the sole relics of our civilization to posterity, what would they make of them? Five thousand years hence suppose any of these books to be discussed by a foreign nation of say highly civilized blacks, civilized as highly, or more highly, in some different way-for the forms of civilization are apparently endless, teste Egypt, China, Japan-than we now are. Suppose them even more wary, more critical, more scientific, indefinitely more ardent in the pursuit of truth, yet even with the humblest spirit of honest and faithful inquiry, it seems almost impossible that they could get over the preliminary difficulty of their ignorance whether the author, whoever he was, invented his story, and if he invented how much he invented, where fiction began and truth ended. How could they, except with knowledge which we can with difficulty conceive, say "This which reads so simply is a bitter sarcasm, that which is so vehemently told is pure imagination; that, again, is plain fact, and this, playful irony found Apply, again, the same canon to Gulliver's Travels. How innocently grave and infinitely child-like are the most poisonous sarcasms, how simple and matter-of-fact is the narrative, how candid and truthful to all appearance is the narrative of the most monstrous fictions, the art rising just in the proportion of the apparent truth and candor, and who could unravel all these elements looking at them out of a different civilization? Again, if we look at the question of the authorship it will make a difference whether the stories were written by one man or more, in one generation or several, whether they are fictions properly so called and purely imaginative, or fictions founded on a subtratum of fact, and that fact contemporary Upon this principle it is that the Arabian Nights are a perpetual source of speculative wonder. No book ever took possession of the world without, so to speak, an antecedent national pedigree of overwhelming literary power and force? No savage could have written Robinson Crusoe. All the bitterness of a nation's lifetime is in Gulliver's Travels, and it took the concentrated literary energy of antecedent centuries to inspire Swift with the very candor and transparency of his livid animosity. A whole antecedent phase of civilization came to a head in Cervantes' Don Quixote. The loves and hatreds, the myriad thoughts of centuries of bitterness, and suffering, and joy and ridicule, and passion, and contempt, are all condensed in the production of that book. And is it conceivable that the Arabian Nights with all their apparently elemental simplicity are nothing more than an assemblage of mere childish fictions, with no other meaning of any kind than the surface of each line conveys? To us this supposition is simply inconceivable. If, however, we are asked what do you conceive they really mean, we must confess our simple ignorance. We read them with wonder and helpless speculation. As an illustration, however, of what we mean, consider this passage taken at random from Gulliver's Travels. Gulliver is vindicating the reputation of the Lilliputian lady whose coach and six he was in the habit of lifting upon his table: "I am here obliged,' says he, 'to vindicate the reputation of an excellent lady, who was an innocent sufferer on my account. The treasurer took a fancy to be jealous of his wife, from the malice of some evil tongues, who informed him that her grace had taken a violent affection for |