her feel how oft the innocent stand in the place of the guilty, and receive their just punishments. Delos had, to all the Greeks, a name most holy and beloved above all the other islands of the sea and the privileges which the God bestowed on that, his floating cradle, gave it the character of perpetual life and youth, and unfading serenity. Such suited with the divinity who took mortal shape therein ! None suffered to die, and no pangs of coming life permitted within its groves,-what an image of joy and peace it presents !—as if it were still clothed in the golden flowers which sprang up as the God burst forth to life beneath the bending palm tree! If Delphi were the Holy Land of Greece, Delos was its place of poetry ;-a kind of spiritual Paphos, a purer spot than the "purpled Cytherea ;" as lovely, but more moral, than the regions sacred to Aphrodite. Apollo was to the mind what she was to the senses; and beauty, and love, and all deep trembling joys, were what they could offer to all who would approach them rightly. One portion of that birth-legend is displeasing,-the new-born babe's miraculous strength and wisdom. We love the supernatural, but not that which is counter or unnatural. A man who can perform miracles of strength-a boy who equals a man in force and power-these are images which we receive with admiration as beyond, but not against, nature. But that a helpless newborn child should suddenly assume the functions of a man, shocks all our sense of poetry and harmony. In vain we remember that he is a God. We turn back to that vision in the cave of Crete, and see there a picture so far more true to nature, so far more symmetrical and beautiful, that the plea of God-head remains of no force. Yet we will not think of this. No! no! we will be no carping captious critics to mingle hemlock with our honey. Rich and golden the drops shall flow softly and sweetly one by one, and we will not miss the least to satisfy all our powers of nice discrimination. We will only listen to the shouts of the glad goddesses, answered back by the blue heavens above, we will only look upon the joy of the gentle mother as she bends over the fair child, and only see the golden flowers which clothed the sweet isle of Delos, in Nature's exultation at that high godly birth into the world. And in all this there is more of beauty than any blemishes can hope to obscure. Of the childhood of Apollo there is no record, save that legend which makes him while an infant slay the serpent Pytho. Now though Hercules strangling serpents in his cradle does not displease, being only the premature exhibition of his grand characteristic, yet with Apollo, whose ideal was beauty and poetry, it is unsymmetrical-unharmonious. And so we pass it by, for the brighter time when, a perfect image of manhood, he came before the world its darling God! We know of no image so full of the Godlike as that when Apollo appeared before the Cretan mariners. He shot from their sight as a brilliant blazing star, and came again, a youth of glorious beauty, his long bright hair of gold floating in rich waves, nigh womanish for luxuriance, on his slender neck and rounded shoulders, his countenance radiant, preserving in its perfect features a youth's ingenuous loveliness, and a God's clear majesty of thought and will, his step at once elastic and firm, buoyant and dignified, his look inspiring awe and love together;-the whole Pantheon contains none so glorious conception as this, when Apollo, bidding the bewildered sailors worship him as Dephinos, conducts them to his temple, leading them to that worship by music's heavenly harmony! The Greeks might have imagined nothing more, and still their mythology would have been a world's wonder and a world's study! -- The earliest conceptions of Apollo were those of unstained purity. In later days various love adventures were engrafted into the original idea, consonant neither with its harmony nor its intention. Coronis, the faithless Larissan maid, who died by his own most fatal anger-a death deplored with a god's tears, and atoned for, as far as might be, by his tender care to the unborn babe, the great all-healer Asclepios, pupil of the centaur Cheiron-Daphne, the cruel Daphne, who flies his celestial love-Cassandra who gained her price and then refused her tenderness, a treachery most woefully avenged!-Marpessa, whose choice of the mortal youth argued more of wisdom than of love, more of prudence than of poetry,-Leucothoe, sad maiden, buried by her angry father, and by her Sun-god lover changed into a sweet-leaved incense tree-Cyrene, and the “Fair Voiced" muse Calliope, mother of the divine Orpheus, these, and many more, were the imaginings of later days, in which the first glorious idea of the Silver-Bow'd was lost and degraded. The legend which gives him as a serf to Admetus, the Thessalian King, is one of the most mystic, yet full of meaning too. The servitude of heaven to earth, of the Divine Thing to the Lower-the Mean,-of God to Man, has a deeper meaning for those who well care to trace it out, than the mere physical phenomenon which many would make it. And all this suffering, this misery, this serfdom, for one hasty anger, one crime of bloodshed! It is a legend daily repeated throughout the world; repeated in each man's heart, when he subjugates his own inner individual sense of right to the dictates of that world, and sets man's laws, and the shallowness of seeming appearances before GOD's truth, as he would, if he dared, interpret it,—and the actual living thing places below the apparent! It is a sad truth, that vileness in submission to a lie, which man daily practises! GOD grant that it be changed, before the sun has ceased to shine upon our earth! Too long have we been the followers of forms and delusions and names-of all but the Truth; and a blessed day would it be for man, if, like the liberated God of the Ancient Myth, he should shake off the servitude of the world, and rise back to his original and former place of freedom! Yet Apollo was commanded as a punishment; we lay on ourselves our own chains, and ourselves bind our souls to slavery. Society, custom, opinion, these are the Admeti of our souls!—but surely the day will come when they shall be left for aye! The Grecian Mythology is not without its uses if it can recal us, but a moment, to that purer sphere from which cowardice and sin have banished us. And that sphere is obedience to the Law of Right, the Formula of Duty, which every man carries within him in his own heart-and a defiance, contempt, abnegation of the laws of society which war against this one true individual law ! FALL OF THE PEISISTRADIDE. BASIS OF THE NATIONAL AIR OF ATHENS. SWORD in hand, but sheathed in myrtle, So his blade HARMODIUS carried, On the morning, bright and glorious, And Prerogative in Athens With Hipparchus hung the head. Fools! they trusted to disarm us, With Hipparchus hung the head. Dear HARMODIUS! through such outlets In the isles among the blessed, With Achilles and Tydides, Still thou see'st the light of day. Sword in hand, and sheathed in myrtle, So his blade HARMODIUS carried, When, atoning for the people, Pallas' priests the bullock drew: For the people sacrificing, Freedom's priests the tyrant slew. He that would rule o'er ATHENIANS, Proved he more than flesh and blood, When atoning for the people, Freedom's priests Hipparchus slew. Ah HARMODIUS! blest HARMODIUS! In your liberated Athens, Ye have sweetly sunk to rest; But your fame shall be as lasting of th Sword in hand, and sheathed in myrtle, So his blade HARMODIUS carried, On the morning, bright and glorious, With Hipparchus hung the head. April 17th, 1848. KALLISTRATUS. LETTERS FROM MARGARET MUCKWORTH TO EPISODICAL TO THE SANITARY QUESTION. EDITED BY T. H. SEALY. [The following letters having been sent me by an unknown. correspondent, I can only express my faith in their genuineness, and regret that the gentleman who transcribed and transmitted them, should have destroyed the originals. He may have been induced, possibly, to take that course, from their containing, (I merely conjecture this,) passages calculated to compromise important personages: for it will be observed, by the address of the letters, that Mrs. Greenfield lives "not a great ways from Winsor." I cannot help thinking, however, that my mysterious friend has been at some pains in improving the orthography, and in supplying punctuation. If so, it is to be wished that somebody had put a stop to his labours, and preserved the letters in their original purity.-ED.] MY DEAR EMBLY, LETTER I. NUMBER 16, GIMlett Alley, St. Giles's. I shoold ave ritten to you afore only for the pecks an moar a trouble as we bin in, owing to bein straind for rent, consekence a usband bein hill, an me bein not much better, and our deer boy Bill besides, and Mary as well, and Jane likewise, an indede every one on us, an Edward too. Ime feerful to telly the time as the doctor bin about us; an the eaps an eaps a stuff as |