This is, perhaps, one of Mr. Tayler’s most successful pieces; it has more breadth (if we may use such a term) than he is wont to employ, the absence of which from his writing, we have more than once had occasion to regret.

* * * * *

TIME’S TELESCOPE.

Our old friend Time has this year illustrated his march, or object-glass, with a host of images or spectra—­that is, woodcuts of head and tail pieces—­to suit all tastes—­from the mouldering cloister of other days to the last balloon ascent.  The Notices of Saints’ Days and Holidays, Chronology and Biography, Astronomical and Naturalist’s Notices, are edited with more than usual industry; and the poetry, original and selected, is for the most part very pleasing.

As we have a running account with Time’s Telescope, (who has not?) and occasionally illustrate our pages with extracts during the year, we content ourselves for the present with a quotation from an original article, by “a correspondent from Alveston,” possessing much good feeling and a tone of reflection, to us very pleasing:—­

THE INFLUENCE OF A FLOWER.

Towards the close of a most lovely spring day—­and such a lovely one, to my fancy, has never beamed from the heavens since—­I carelessly plucked a cowslip from a copse side, and gave it to Constance.  ’Twas on that beautiful evening when she told me all her heart! as, seated on a mossy bank, she dissected, with downcast eyes, every part of the flower; chives, pointal, and petal, all were displayed; though I am sure she never even thought of the class.  My destiny through life I considered as fixed from that hour.—­Shortly afterwards I was called, by the death of a relative, to a distant part of England; upon my return, Constance was no more.  The army was not my original destination; but my mind began to be enfeebled by hourly musing upon one subject alone, without cessation or available termination; yet reason enough remained to convince me, that, without change and excitement, it would degenerate into fatuity.

The preparation and voyage to India, new companions, and ever-changing scenes, hushed my feelings, and produced a calm that might be called a state of blessedness—­a condition in which the ignoble and inferior ingredients of our nature were subdued by the divinity of mind.  Years rolled on in almost constant service; nor do I remember many of the events of that time, even with interest or regret.  In one advance of the army to which I was attached, we had some skirmishing with the irregulars of our foe; the pursuit was rapid, and I fell behind my detachment, wounded and weary, in ascending a ghaut, resting in the jungle, with languid eyes fixed on the ground, without any particular feeling but that of fatigue, and the smarting of my shoulder.  A cowslip caught my sight! my