council-smokes of the aborigines, in the pathless forests of the west. It has encountered and conquered every obstacle ;-the book which James I. fulminated against it-the opposition of Papal bulls, of Transylvanian edicts, of Persian anathemas;—and by the aid of Nicot, with Catharine de Medicis, (who may perhaps have chawed,') and the great crowd of amateurs who continue to patronize it, the whole eastern continent glories in its use, and is loud in its praise. Since the Haytien began to draw its blue wreaths through his derivative pipe, as he watched the distant sea, dancing to the balmy winds from the palm groves of his native land, the world has bowed to the Nicotian weed. From Iceland to the tropics, and from Jerusalem to the Pacific, it is in request. Protean in its forms, it intoxicates in pigtail, twist, or plug,-in cigar or snuff. In the latter substance, how many a lofty nostril has it pleased,-how many old women and great men has it delighted! It was the last comfort of Napoleon, when he cried Sauve qui peut!' at Waterloo, and rode through bloody battallions of the wounded and dying, away from the victorious legions of Wellington. When an old Irish vixen in a London police office was charged by her husband, to whom she had been rebellious, in a row, with taking two ounces of snuff per diem, what was her answer? Lawful powers, yer Warship! What is two ounces of blissid snuff, to a poor onfortinit woman, as gives suck to two childer?' It was an appeal that went home at once to the proboscis of the magistrate, and the woman was discharged.

Much as tobacco has been lauded, snuff has perhaps received a greater share of eulogy. Even the organ to whose pleasure it ministers has been addressed, among many others, by the facetious author of ‘Absurdities,' as the source of his supremest rapture. Hear him :

'Knows he that never took a pinch,
Nosey, the pleasure thence which flows?
Knows he the titillating joy,

Which my nose knows?

Oh, Nose! I am as proud of thee,
As any mountain of its snows:-
I gaze on thee, and feel the joy,
A Roman knows!'

But this is an episode, since snuff is not directly consociated with the effusion of spittle.' Tobacco is. Who chews, and smokes, and salivates not? Who ever attended a church, a theatre, a political meeting, or any assembly, legislatures even, and did not see the effects of tobacco? Who has not witnessed them at parties, at balls,-any where, and every where? How many divines and statesmen have I known, the misanthropic corners of whose lips exhibited the stained and pursed-up wrinkles of tobacco! Your student and your blood, (ruminating bipeds, who smoke or chew,) expectorate themselves away, and look like old men long before they are forty.

Yet it is the abuse, rather than the use, of tobacco, of which I complain. Under the rose, I have some respect, myself for a cigar; and I do not object to some kinds of scented snuff. It is pleasant to smell the airy whiffs, circling around one's contemplative nose, and to enjoy the excitement of a sneeze. But moderation should guide us in these mat

ters; for ptyalism is so much of a habit, that in my opinion, it might be abated two-thirds, in every one of our countrymen; and I think that many valuable lives would thus be lengthened.

With regard to expectoration, I would say, that when 'tis done, it would be well if it were done secretly. I am no advocate of the English custom of salivating into the handkerchief, and carrying in a pocket the havest of one's palatic department. Neither do I think that we should care a tobacco-stopper what foreign zantippes or scribblers think of the custom, only so far as their scrictures may seem to be just. In truth, after the falsehoods with which the European public has been deluged respecting our manners, the mere sight of an English tourist, male or fe male, in this country, is enough to make an American citizen spit from sheer disgust. We mean those tourists, who grumble when they land; grumble their six weeks' transit through the republic, and then grumble themselves into a packet-cabin, and go home to make a grumbling book. It is not surprising that folk like these have seen a good deal of ptyalism. Every such raven of passage is a walking ptysmagogue, and excites the very discharges that are so vehemently condemned.

There is a juste milieu in this habit, which, as a nation, we have not hit as yet, though we are much nearer to it than the spittle-pocketing kingdom which has furnished us with so many peripatetic philosophers on the subject. Let a general effort be made to touch this happy medium. To use a pun of some longevity, we must expectorate less, before we can expect to rate as a polished nation. I appeal to all frequenters of public places, whether my advice be not good. Let it be followed. Let it be henceforth declared no more, as it has been, that 'an American spits from his cradle to his grave; at the board of his friend, at the feet of his mistress, at the drawing-room of his president, at the altar of his God: he salivates for three score years and ten; and when the glands of his palate can secrete no longer, he spits forth his spirit, and is gathered to his fathers, to spit no more.'

Communipaw, November 22, 1834,

JOHN W. SANGRADO, M. D,

SONNET.

DEEP sunk in thought, he sat beside the river-
Its wave in liquid lapses glided by,

Nor watched in crystal depth his vacant eye

The willow's high o'erarching foliage quiver.-
From dream to shadowy dream returning ever,
He sat like statue, on the grassy verge;
His thoughts, a phantom train, in airy surge
Streamed visionary onward, pausing never.
As autumn wind in mountain forest weaving
Its wondrous tapestry of leaf and bower,
O'ermastering the night's resplendent flower,

With tints like hues of heaven, the eye deceiving,-
So, lost in labarynthine maze, he wove

A wreath of flowers, the golden thread was love.

P.

THE WITCHES' REVEL.

ON with the dance! Let the echoing earth
From the depth of its caverns resound to our mirth,
"Tis the blithe hour of revel! the hated moonlight
Is quenched in the scowl of the tempest-winged night!
The spirits of death and of vengeance are nigh,
And their voice of wail moans to the darkened sky!

On with the dance! On the far battle field
Dimmed with gore is the glitter of helmet and shield,
The fell stream of carnage still reeks on the air-
And the raven stoops earthward, his banquet to share:

Let him feast! The last breath from the vanquished is sped-
But our song shall exult o'er the festering dead!

On with the dance! Of the red lightning's gleam
We will twine us a wreath that in triumph shall beam;
For the pale flowers of earth, in that garland to shine,
Of our victim's torn limbs, gasping trophies we'll twine!
For the rich mantling wine cup, of victory to tell,
With the heart's drained life-blood, our goblets shall swell!

Sisters-rejoice! On yon foam-crested wave

There are ships going down with the fair and the brave!
As the storm petrel flaps his wing fitfully there,

Ye may hear in the wild blast the curse and the prayer!
Ye may hear the last groan as the victim sweeps by-
Ye may catch the last gleam of the quivering eye!"

Wake the loud reve!! The roar of the sea,

And the drowning one's death-shriek, our music shall be!
While our beacon of vengeance illumines the night,

And the deep thunder peals from his mantle of light

While the freed winds rejoice, and the fierce lightnings glance'Tis the blithe hour of revel! On-on with the dance!

E. F. E.

THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE.

BETWEEN the past and present, like the gray
And shadowy twilight in whose gleam are met
The night whose darkness has been, and the day
Whose glory is to be, but is not yet,

The present hangs. Behind-the mingled light
Comes from a thousand stars, that through the night,

Of the dark ages twinkled faint and far,

While here and there, the harbingers of dawn,
Still high and radiant shines a glorious star.
Before us shoot the silvery streaks of morn,
Gleams of increasing brightness, that forerun
The splendor of the still unrisen sun.

LITERARY NOTICES.

CALAVAR, OR THE KNIGHT OF THE CONQUEST. A Romance of Mexico. In two vols. pp. 574. Philadelphia: CAREY, LEA AND BLANCHARD.

The flattering predictions which were first uttered respecting this novel in the October number of our Magazine have been fully verified. This work has made its way at once into favor, and been the subject of applauses not more unusual than just. It would be useless now to enter into a regular review of volumes that are on the round tables and in the minds of a large portion of our readers. They have perused and admired. They have been thrilled by descriptions of battles and conquests, unsurpassed by the best of Scott; they have wondered at the magical facility with which the author of Calavar has wrought up the splendid materials furnished from a few years' space in the history of Mexico. We have already given an outline of the work; and no hindrance remains to an appreciation of the isolated passages which we now present ;-since the burthen and drift of the Tale are already in the possession of those who have merely read our analysis. The adventures of the weary and halfdemented knight, Calavar, of his kinsman, de Leste, of the Moor, Abdallah, and his daughter Jacinto, (afterwards the fair heroine Leila,) are related with wonderful skill, in language perfectly appropriate, and such as no lover of good English can read without pleasure. The exploits of Cortes and Montezuma, and the armies under their command-the ter rific results of their warlike encounters, and the pictures of scenery, are all wrought up with a distinctness almost as palpable as reality. What for example can be more exquisite than the subjoined tableaux of Mexico?

"While the cavalier was yet speaking, there came from the van of the army, very far in the distance, a shout of joy, that was caught up by those who toiled in his neighborhood, and continued by the squadrons that brought up the rear, until finally lost among the echoes of remote cliffs. He pressed forward with the animation shared by his companions, and, still leading Jacinto, arrived, at last, at a place where the mountain dipped downwards with so sudden and so precipitous a declivity, as to interpose no obstacle to the vision. The mists were rolling away from his feet in huge wreaths, which gradually, as they became thinner, received and transmitted the rays of an evening sun, and were lighted up with a golden and crimson radiance, glorious to behold, and increasing every moment in splendor. As this superb curtain was parted from before him, as if by cords that went up to heaven, and surged voluminously aside, he looked over the heads of those that thronged the side of the mountain beneath, and saw, stretching away like a picture touched by the hands of angels, the fair valley embosomed among those romantic hills, whose shadows were stealing visibly over its western slopes, but leaving all the eastern portion dyed with the tints of sunset. The green plains studded with yet greener woodlands; the little mountains raising their fairy-like crests; the lovely lakes, now gleaming like floods of molten silver, where they stretched into the sunshine, and now vanishing away, in a shadowy expanse, under the gloom of the growing twilight; the structures that rose, vaguely and obscurely, here from their verdant margins, and there from their very bosom, as if floating on their placid waters, seeming at one time to present the image of a city crowned with towers and pinnacles, and then again broken by some agitation of the element, or confused by some vapor swimming through the atmosphere, into the mere fragments and phantasms of edifices,-these, seen in that uncertain and fading

light, and at that misty and enchanting distance, unfolded such a spectacle of beauty and peace as plunged the neophyte into a revery of rapture. The trembling of the page's hand, a deep sigh that breathed from his lips, recalled him to consciousness, without however dispelling his delight.

"Passing the night in a little hamlet on the mountain side, the army was prepared, at the dawn of the following day, to resume its march. But the events of this march being varied by nothing but the change of prospect, and the wonder of those by whom the valley was seen for the first time, we will not imitate the prolixity of our authority, the worthy Don Cristobal, but despatch, in a word, the increasing delight and astonishment with which Don Amador de Leste, after having satiated his appetite with views of lake and garden, surveyed the countless villages and towns of hewn stone that rose, almost at every moment, among them. A neck of land now separates the lakes of Chalco and Xochimilco; and the retreat of the waters has left their banks deformed with fens and morasses, wherein the wild-duck screams among waving reeds and bulrushes. Originally, these basins were united in one long and lovely sheet of water, divided indeed, yet only by a causey built by the hands of man, which is now lost in the before-mentioned neck, together with its sluices and bridges, as well as a beautiful little city, that lay midway between the two shores, called by the Spaniards Venezuela, (because rising, like its aristocratic godmother, from among the waters,) until they discovered that this was a peculiarity presented by dozens of other cities in the valley. Here was enjoyed the spectacle of innumerable canoes, paddled, with corn and merchandise, from distant towns, or parting with a freight of flowers from the chinampas, or floating gardens. But this was a spectacle disclosed by other cities of greater magnitude and beauty; and when, from the streets of the royal city Iztapalapan, the army issued at once upon the broad and straight dike that stretched for more than two leagues in length, a noble highway, through the salt floods of Tezcuco; when the neophyte beheld islands rocking like anchored ships in the water, the face of the lake thronged with little piraguas, and the air alive with snowy gulls; when he perceived the banks of this great sheet, as far as they could be seen, lined with villages and towns; and especially when he traced far away in the distance, in the line of the causeway, such a multitude of high towers and shadowy pyramids looming over the waters, as denoted the presence of a vast city,-he was seized with a spec es of awe at the thought of the marvellous ways of God, who had raised up that mighty empire, all unknown to the men of his own hemisphere, and now revealed it, for the accomplishment of a destiny which he trembled to imagine. He rode at the head of the army, in a post of distinction, by the side of Cortes, and felt moved to express some of the strange ideas which haunted him; but looking on the general attentively, he perceived about his whole countenance and figure an expression of singular gloom, mingled with such unusual haughtiness, as quickly indisposed him to conversation."

We feel a strong desire to give a full analysis of this novel,-to point out its beauties, and to follow the golden thread of romance to its end,-but our space dampens the idea; and we can only commend Calavar as a work of uncommon power; faithful to history, remarkably correct and rich in diction, and in point of style, immeasurably before any work of fiction with which the American public has been regaled for years.

There is one fault, venial perhaps to the clear-minded and chivalrous reader, with which Calavar is chargeable. It is too stately; too uniformly faithful to the time, in its episodes, which, though not numerous, are sufficiently so to make us wish for more. The author has too much to do with the fancy, and not enough with the heart, that mysterious organ, whose every chord and impulse he can waken, if he will. There is a pleasing excitement in looking upon the strivings of Ambition to reach the cold pinnacles of fame; but we love to see mingled with that strife, the pathos of struggling and thwarted affection, the toil, the suspense, the triumph, and the comment upon all. In a romance, let the author of