Love is subtle: it has as many forms as Proteus; as many hands as Briareus; as many eyes as Argos-and each eye constantly seeks some new work for each hand to do.

"I love my Love,

And my Love loves me."

These are very simple words, though they have haunted me with a strange fascination. I do not recall the name of their author, nor the place of their occurrence. A friend has just told me that they are what one little bird sings to another in some verses for children. It matters not.

"To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

And these words, homely as the homeliest flower a weed wears for its crown, have driven me in upon myself far away from all contact with the material—into the hidden galleries of the memory where are sculptured all the events of my Past.

Layard found in Nineveh that the kings built their records into their palace-walls, the inscriptions serving as an ornament, like the patterns on our paper-hangings.

There are such sculptured palace-walls in my memory. To visit these; to recall the emotions that once stirred me; to look at the inscriptions, here angular and sharp and jagged with recent pain, there smoothed and polished by consoling Time; to forget others and study myself; to let my Now-Life (as the Greeks would say) sleep and waken my Then-Life; to be young and hopeful, whereas I am now so no longer- how imperative at times; how delightful and improving always!

What though she whom I call my Goddess be another's? In these halls it is again the luxuriant summer-eve when she walked with her hand upon my arm, as I told her of my hopes and fears. Once more the tenderness of heart which then made my tones mellow and round, suffuses me. Once more the great joy which choked my utterance and made my words few, swells within me. Once more the little shell of present good which the ocean of the Future threw at my feet, is an earnest of the good the Happy Isles have in store for Us. Once more her slightest word is great with a hidden sense. Once more her speech, which has but an ordinary meaning to others, comes to my ears fraught with the sweet perfume of Love as the sailor scents land in a breeze which the

passengers do not remark as different from those they have had all through the voyage. Once more her "Thank you" means "I love my Love," and her smile says, "And my Love loves me." Once more her self-reliant spirit seems to distrust itself in my presence, Once more her quickness, her sharp words, her keen retorts, are but the shaking of charms that my eye may single out my Love from all who surround her. Once more I am weak before her. Once more the dam of my prudence is swept away by the torrent that gushes from my heart. Once more I forget my resolve never to speak to any woman of Love till I am worthy. And once more I tell my story. 'Tis the same old story

"What safe my heart holds, though no word
Could I repeat now, if I tasked

My powers forever, to a third."

"Pass the rest." I have that tablet draped. Perhaps when I am gone the veil may be removed, and others look on what I have kept sacred.

Had I been deceived?

They say that an Ideal Lady walks ever in our Fancy who is all to us that woman can be. They say that she sits on the croup of every knight's saddle, and nerves him to battle. They say

that it is her hand that confers the laurel-her kerchief that staunches the blood. Can it be that we gaze into the depths of this Ideal Lady's eyes until some real Lady's eyes have the same meaning? When our Ideal Lady speaks, her tones are hushed, and her words tremble with Love. Can it be, then, that we attribute the tremulousness of the real Lady's tones to Love, when Love is not the cause, but some other emotion, or even some accident of surrounding circumstances?

Had I done so ?

Dante loved a Beatrice, immortal and angelic, while the actual Beatrice laughed at him. Can it be that, joined to him in fate, though not in name, I loved a Beatrice and worshipped her, while she laughed at me? Can it be she had no thought of me in all those graces wherewith she robed herself? Was the garment

worn for all, and not for me?

They told me afterwards that she played with me and drew a

cruel pleasure from my pain. But surely they belied her !

Another calls her his Love. And by-and-bye in his nest she will sweetly sing this song:

"I love my Love

And my Love loves me."

He is worthy any woman's love. Yet as I sit in my sculptured palace, here and here only, mark you-do I pronounce him unworthy her Love. For he can not, he can not love her as I did. Nor can she ever be with him the woman she would have been with me. Do you think this boastful and vain? Remember, I may say in my private room what I would not in my parlor. There I should hide the deformed neck. Here I may cast off my cravat, if I will. No, she will never be with him what she might have been with me. I should have treasured the Cremona, and drawn from it such grand wierd tones as the common viol never sounds. He does not know that she is a Cremona. And I? Yes, that makes me sad. Oh, she would have made me so much wiser, so much better, so much more all that is desirable than I can now be.

Once in a life-time the golden chain of possibility is let down. before us. If we seize it, we attain; if we fail to grasp it if it elude us, it never comes again!

What grieves me chiefly is, that if she had been mine, and I had attained to pluck the golden fruits, they should have been all poured into her lap! She can never know the tenderness of desire there was in me to make her happy.

Well, I staked all. I lost! I have since done something. But, oh, how unlike my attainment has been to what it would have been had she blessed me !

The sun shines upon all the world. It makes the broad meadow glad, fertilizes the glebe, ripens the flowers, and goes even into the caverns and deep holes in the rocks and beautifies them. But there are spots where the sun seems to shine all the year round, And on these spots there grow such

and with tender affection.

life and beauty that only poets may describe them.

The moon bathes everything in silver. But she kisses Endymion.

She, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, makes fertile all minds that her light falls on, and betters all hearts. Even the dark and bad lose their darkness and grow good in her presence.

But I should have been Endymion, and the Sun should always have shone upon me.

When the sun has withdrawn, the forces of Cold and Death do yet something notable. There are mountains and fields and castled battlements, and the aurora flashes with all its beauty above them. But they are all icy and cold- -a ghastly counterfeit of

Life.

Possibly I may do something; but it shall have only the strength of ice, and be lighted only by the cold phantasm of shifting Popular Favor- while my mind might have been tropical, and its fruits luxuriant, and the moon might have ever kissed her Endymion!

Do you wonder, then, that, when I see what I am and what I might have been, what I was and what I shall be, I come often to my secret chamber and look at these sculptured walls?

Here I can sit and dream my dreams over, till, dreaming the sweetest of them all, I fall asleep to the lullaby of—

"I love my Love,

And my Love loves me."

AWAY, haunt thou not me,
Thou vain Philosophy!
Little hast thou bestead,
Save to perplex the head

And leave the spirit dead.

Unto thy broken cisterns wherefore go,

While from the secret treasure-depths below,

Fed by the skiey shower,

And clouds that sink and rest on hill-tops high,

Wisdom at once and Power,

Are welling, bubbling forth, unseen, incessantly?

Why labor at the dull mechanic oar,
When the fresh breeze is blowing,

And the strong current flowing,

Right onward to the Eternal shore ?

CRITICAL NOTICES.

WOMAN'S RIGHT TO LABOR; OR, LOW WAGES AND HARD WORK: In Three Lectures, delivered in Boston, November, 1859. By CAROLINE H. DALL. Boston: Walker, Wise & Co. 1860.

Whilst her husband is battling with the religion and the caste of India, Mrs. Dall seems to find India at her door in Boston. The Professor opens his story in the Atlantic with a chapter on "The Brahmin Caste of New England;" and when we read the Laws affecting Women throughout the country-Laws pretty generally given by New England-we feel as if the Professor had hit the nail on the head a little harder than he meant to.

The work before us goes straight to the point; and reading certain eloquent passages we feel that Margaret Fuller's mantle did not pass into heaven with her. Mrs. Dall does not occupy her time or ours with discussing the millenniul privilege of voting and going to Congress. She deals with pressing evils, and affirms necessary claims. In these days, when Woman is passing the bridge Al Sirat- fine as a hair, sharp as a scimitar's edge-which leads to her Paradise of Development, it is encouraging to have a Voice to call men to their manhood, and show them that it is bound up with the health and safety of their imperiled sisters. We place her final appeal on record: "In the ballads of Northern Europe, a loving sister trod out with her bare feet the nettles whose fibre, woven into clothing, might one day restore her brothers to human form. Your feet are shod, your nettles are gathered: will you tread them out courageously, and so restore to your sisters the nature and the privileges of a blessed humanity ?"

EVENINGS AT THE MICROSCOPE; OR, RESEARCHES AMONG THE MINUTER FORMS AND ORGANS OF ANIMAL LIFE. By PHILIP HENRY Gosse, F.RS New York: D Appleton & Co. 1860. Cincinnati Rickey, Mallory & Co.

It is verily true, then, as George Herbert announces, Man is one world and hath another to attend him." But how little do we know of our attendant ! How many heedless travelers had passed over those old fields of Mesopotamia, and seen nothing: yet here comes one who knows how to look at pebbles as keenly as stars, - a brick with some human carving on it arrests his attention; he picks it up and scrutinizes it, then begins to dig: then forth shines the ancient and long-buried splendor of Nineveh! But we need not go East for the exploration of buried palaces and marvels; there is no Layard like your microscope. Under it your hair waves, a palm-grove; your skin shows your relation to the ancestral Saurus; and looking at your blood, which is strangely like that of a Kangaroo, you no more wonder that Swedenborg saw the whole Animal Kingdom in a globule of blood. We intend to present our readers with a paper on this subject in some future number of the Dial, and so content