CHILDHOOD.

O yes! I love the pigmy race,
In whom old age delights to trace

Some features of its prime :
The wingless cherubs, kindly given,
To bring the atmosphere of heaven
Down to earth's colder clime!

I love the limbs, so round and fair,
The smooth, white brow, the flaxen hair
That waves in ringlets free;
The dimpled cheek of rosy hue,
And the clear eye of laughing blue,
Bright as a summer-sea.

I love the little, graceful ways,
The sense alive to blame or praise,
The wonder never still;

And the gay prattle, that is heard
From morn to eve, like song of bird,
Or music of the rill.

And, loving these, how much I hate
The whims perverse of modern date

(Opposed to Nature's law),

That fain would force the growth of men, And change the carol of the wren

To chattering of the daw!

Then come with me, and join my walk,
Thou trusting child! and we will talk
Throughout the livelong day:
But for thy books of wordy lore,
And all thy scientific store-

O, fling the trash away!

Thy budding lips are nowise meet
Such empty jargon to repeat

As mocks the pedant's toil;
Thy dawn of life has happier dreams
Than sages find in those dull themes,
Which waste the midnight oil.

By thee I rather would be told
How gentle fairies lived of old,

And grisly ogres too;

Of Jack, who climbed the beanstalk tall, Of Puss in Boots, and Tom the Small, And Cinderella's shoe!

Of her, who slept a hundred years,
With her old sire and all his peers,

Till wakened by a kiss;

Of Beauty, whose kind heart was moved
By that poor Beast-and how he loved,
And how he made her his!

And let the future hero's joy

Flush thy young cheek, thou gallant boy! When I in turn shall tell

How brave Saint George like lightning flew Upon each perilous foe, and slew

The dragon fierce and fell.

And, as we stroll along the glade,
The tear of pity shall be paid

To those sweet babes, who died
Locked in each other's arms, and there
Unburied lay, till Robin's care

The tender limbs did hide.

And, when beneath the trees we rest,
A pensive sigh will heave thy breast,
Thou child so fair and good!
As thou shalt image to thy thought
How Valentine and Orson fought
Within the leafy wood!

BERLIN.-Berlin has the air of the metropolis of a kingdom of yesterday. No Gothic churches, narrow streets, fantastic gable ends, no historical stone and lime, no remnants of the picturesque ages, recal the olden time. Voltaire in satin breeches and powdered peruke, Frederic the Great in jackboots and pigtail, and the French classical age of Louis XIV., the traveller. are the men and times Berlin calls up to the imagination of A fine city, however, Berlin is-very like the of palaces, that is, of huge barrack-like edifices with pillars, age she represents-very fine and very nasty. Berlin is a city statues, and all the regular frippery of the tawdry school of classical French architecture-all in stucco, and frequently out at elbows, discovering the naked brick under the tattered yellow faded covering of plaster. The fixtures which strike the eye in the streets of Berlin are vast fronts of buildings, clumsy ornaments, clumsy statues, clumsy inscriptions, a profusion of gilding, guard-houses, sentry boxes; the moveables are sentries presenting arms every minute, officers with feathers and orders passing unceasingly, hackney droskies rattling about, and numbers of well-dressed people. The streets are spacious and straight, with broad margins on each side for foot passengers; and a band of plain flagstones on these margins make them much more walkable than the streets of most continental towns. But these margins are divided from the spacious carriage-way in the middle by open kennels, telling the nose unutterable things. These open kennels are boarded over only at the gateways of the palaces to let the carriages cross them, and must be particularly convenient for the inhabitants, for they are not at all particularly agreeable. Use reconciles people to nuisances which might be easily removed. A sluggish but considerable river, the Spree, stagnates through the town, and the money laid out in stucco work and outside decoration of the houses would go far towards covering over their drains, raising the water by engines, and sending it in a purifying stream through every street and sewer. If bronze and marble could smell, Blucher and Bulow, Schwerin and Zeithen, and duck-winged angels, and two-headed eagles innumerable, would be found on their pedestals, holding their noses instead of grasping their swords. It is a curious illustration of the difference between the civilization of the fine arts and that of the useful arts, in their influences on social well-being, that this city, as populous as Glasgow or Manchester, has an Italian opera, two or three theatres, a vast picture gallery, and statue gallery, and museums of all kinds, a musical academy, schools of all descriptions, an university with 142 professors the most distinguished men of science who can be collected in Germany, and is undoubtedly the capital, the central point of taste, in the fine arts and of mind and intelligence in literature, for a vast proportion of the enlightened and refined of the European population-and yet has not advanced so far in the enjoyments and comforts of life, in the civilization of the useful arts, as to have water conveyed in pipes into their city, and into their houses. Three hundred thousand people have taste enough to be in die-away ecstacies at the singing of Madame Pasta, or the dancing of Taglioni, and have not taste enough to appreciate, or feel the want of a supply of water in their kitchens, sculleries, drains, sewers, water-closets. Laing's Notes of a Traveller.

CHRISTIAN ART.-John of Fiesoli belonged to the Dominican order, in which he was so revered for sanctity, that the brethren styled him the angelic. "Brother Angelico might have led," says Vasari, "a very happy life in the world, but as he wished, above all things, to provide for the salvation of his soul, he embraced a religious life, without renouncing his no less decided vocation for painting, reconciling thus the care of his eternal happiness, with the acquisition of an immortal name amongst men." Vasari concludes that such au extraordinary talent as he possessed could only be the attendant on the highest sanctity, for to succeed as he did in religious subjects, the artist himself must be religious and holy. Called to Rome by Pope Eugene IV., his paintings in the Vatican, of the histories of St. Laurence and of St. Stephen, admirable as they were, did not make such an impression on the Pontiff as the soul of the artist, so that the see of Florence, being vacant, he conceived the idea of conferring upon him the Archiepiscopal office; but the humility of brother Angelico prevailed, and it was the praise with which he then spoke of brother Antonius, that occasioned the latter to be made Archbishop of Florence by Nicholas V. At the court of Rome he lived as in his cloister; and Pope Nicholas was obliged to compel him, on obedience, to moderate his austerities. He never painted a crucifixion without shedding many tears, and worked at that, ALPHA. as also at the figures of the blessed Virgin, always on his

knees. Michael Angelo said, that it was humanly impossible to paint such a blessed form as he composed of Mary, in his picture of the Annunciation: the painter must have beheld her. And Goerres says, that in this, as in many other of his works, besides the exquisite grace and beauty resulting from skill, it is impossible not to recognise a still higher beauty, evincing all the characteristics of mystic vision. James, the German, on his return from the Holy Land, furnished another instance of this wonderful combination of art and purity. Of his heroic obedience as a monk, a curious instance is recorded: : on one occasion, having placed a beautiful painting on glass in the furnace, the prior, to prove his merit, ordered him to take his black cap and go into the streets to beg alms; he complied without a word, and remained absent many hours; on his return he went anxiously to the furnace, and found that all had succeeded; the painting, in the lines and colours, had become faultless, and in fact incomparable. Lippo Dalmasio, in whom the traditional piety of the old Bolognese school was so conspicuous, may be added to these great examples, for he, like Jacopo Avanzi, would paint nothing but images of the blessed Virgin; and he never sat down to paint without having fasted the day before, and gone to communion on the morning itself, in order to purify his imagination and sanctify his pencil. In his latter days he embraced the monastic life, and continued to paint Madonnas, which he distributed as alms among the people. Guido discerned something supernatural in his paintings, and affirmed that no study or talents could give the power of combining in a figure, such holiness, modesty, and purity. Ile used often to be seen in an ecstacy before one of his pictures, when uncovered on some festival of the blessed Virgin. That the artist of the middle ages regarded himself as the preacher's assistant, is expressly affirmed by Buffalmacco, one of the pupils of Giotto: "As for us painters," saith he, "our sole business is to make saints, holy men, and holy women, on walls, and over altars, in order that by their means, men, to the great despite of demons, may be more disposed to piety and virtue."-Mores Catholici.

CHRISTIANITY IN AFFGHANISTAN.- It is matter of agreeable surprise to any one acquainted with the Mahomedans of India, Persia, and Turkey, and with their religious prejudices, to find that the people Caubul are entirely free from them. The Christian is respectfully called a Kitábi, or one of "the Book." The dissolute Vazir, Fati Khân, when occasionally an Armenian Christian presented himself, desiring to become a convert to Islám, was wont to inquire what he had found deficient in his own religion, that he wished to change it? and would remark that those persons who possessed a Book and would adopt a new faith, were scoundrels, actuated by love of gain or other interested motives. To the Hindù, anxious to enter the pale of the Mahomedan Church, he made no objec. tion: on the contrary, he applauded him, who, having no religion, embraced one. Some years since, a Jew was heard to speak disrespectfully of Jesus Christ; he was arraigned and convicted before the Mahomedan tribunals on a charge of blasphemy. The sentence was sang sár, or to be stoned to death. The unhappy culprit was brought to the Armenians, that they, as particularly interested, might carry into effect the punishment of the law. They declined, when the Mahomedans led the poor wretch without the city, and his life became the forfeit of his indiscretion. It was singular that an attack upon the Divinity of Our Saviour should have been held cognizable in a Mahomedan Ecclesiastical Court, and that it should have been resented by those who, in their theological disputes with Christians, never fail to cavil upon that very point. The Jew, in averring that Jesus Christ was the son of the carpenter, Joseph, had differed from their own belief on that subject: but, had not the assertion been made by a Jew, who would have noticed it? How true is it, that the Jews are everywhere the despised, the rejected race!-Masson's Balochistan, Afghanistan, and the Punjab. Vol. 2, pp. 244-7.

such as no known tribe on the face of the earth at the present day is so barbarous, so destitute of humanity, feeling for others, and discrimination of right and wrong, as to enjoy or tolerate. The New Zealander, or the Cherokee of the present day, stands higher as a moral being imbued with feelings of humanity, and of duty to his fellow men, than the citizen of ancient Rome in his most civilized state. Is this no improvement in the social condition of man? Is man not in a progressive state as a moral and intellectual being? We may rather ask, if human nature itself has not changed during these eighteen centuries; and if we really belong to the same species of beings, as the men who, eighteen centuries ago, laid those stones upon each other, for the uses for which this immense fabric was erected? These stones are still sharply square. Man has changed more than his works.-Laing Notes of a Traveller.

A FEW PARTING WORDS.

It is with much regret that I have to announce to my readers the discontinuance, for the present at least, of the PENNY LIBRARY. This little miscellany was originally started when the TRUE TABLET was in difficulties, and before an appeal to public bounty had been resolved upon. It was then thought just possible that a small periodical of this kind might meet with such sudden success as to support, not only its own cost, but a part, at least, of the weekly loss of the TRUE TABLET. I hope the fact of my having made such an attempt, entailing, as it has done, a very considerable addition of labour upon myself and my coadjutors, will be taken as a proof that I was not inclined to call upon others for aid before I had exhausted my own means and powers for ensuring success. The LIBRARY has now been nine weeks before the public, during which time no effort beyond the weekly announcements in the TRUE TABLET has been made to push it into notice. From the experience of this nine weeks I am able to say confidently that such a periodical was very much wanted; and I have every encouragement to renew, on a future occasion and under more favourable circumstances, the effort that has now been made. For the present, however, I feel it necessary to discontinue this little work, and chiefly for the following reasons:-I, and the gentlemen who are employed with me on the TRUE TABLET, have really no more time at our disposal than can be very profitably and properly employed on that journal. And even if we were disposed to continue this additional labour while the TABLET remains at its present size, its approaching enlargement, at the beginning of the new year, would render such a continuance almost impossible. At any rate, whatever care was bestowed upon the LIBRARY would be so much taken away from the newspaper.

Another reason for the discontinuance of the LIBRARY is, that it has been considered advisable, under present circumstances, to do everything that can be done to increase the circulation of the TRUE TABLET. It has reasonably been thought that, in the present state of the Catholic reading public, every new periodical, however dissimilar from those already existing, does, in some degree, enter into competition with them, and tends to keep down their circulation. Now, I certainly wish to avoid this with the TRUE TABLET, so long, at least, as it is barely struggling for existence; and I have very little doubt that the PENNY LIBRARY does tend to take away subscribers from it.

thus take my leave of the kind readers of this little work; newspaper in Great Britain. It is not without pain that I and I do so hoping to meet them again in something of the same fashion at no very distant hereafter.-F. LUCAS. London: Printed by PALMER and CLAYTON, 10, Crane-court, Fleetstreet; and published by GEORGE DISMORE, at the Office of the TRUE TABLET, 6, Catherine-street, Strand; whither all communications must be sent, addressed (prepaid) to FREDERICK LUCAS, the sole Editor and Proprietor.