the thorn. 
  Sweet is love’s sun within the heavens alone,
  But not less sweet when tempered by a cloud
  Of daily duties!  Love’s elixir, drained
  From out the pure and passionate cup of youth,
  Is sweet; but better, providently used,
  A few drops sprinkled in each common dish
  Wherewith the human table is set forth,
  Leavening all with heaven.  Seated high
  Among his people, on the lofty dais,
  Dispensing judgment,—­making woodlands ring
  Behind a flying hart with hound and horn,—­
  Talking with workmen on the tawny sands,
  ’Mid skeletons of ships, how best the prow
  May slice the big wave and shake off the foam,—­
  Edwin preserved a spirit calm, composed,
  Still as a river at the full of tide;
  And in his eye there gathered deeper blue,
  And beamed a warmer summer.  And when sprang
  The angry blood, at sloth, or fraud, or wrong,
  Something of Bertha touched him into peace
  And swayed his voice.  Among the people went
  Queen Bertha, breathing gracious charities,
  And saw but smiling faces; for the light
  Aye looks on brightened colors.  Like the dawn
  (Beloved of all the happy, often sought
  In the slow east by hollow eyes that watch)
  She seemed to husked find clownish gratitude,
  That could but kneel and thank.  Of industry
  She was the fair exemplar, us she span
  Among her maids; and every day she broke
  Bread to the needy stranger at her gate. 
  All sloth and rudeness fled at her approach;
  The women blushed and courtesied as she passed,
  Preserving word and smile like precious gold;
  And where on pillows clustered children’s heads,
  A shape of light she floated through their dreams.”

History, Theory, and Practice of the Electric Telegraph.  By GEORGE B. PRESCOTT, Superintendent of Electric Telegraph Lines.  Boston:  Ticknor and Fields. 1861. 12mo.

It may be safely said that no one of the wonder-working agencies of the nineteenth century, of an importance in any degree equal to that of the Electric Telegraph, is so little understood in its practical details by the world at large.  Its results come before us daily, to satisfy our morning and evening appetite for news; but how few have a clear knowledge of even the simplest rules which govern its operation, to say nothing of the vast and complicated system by which these results are made so universal!  The general intelligence, at present, doubtless outruns the dull apprehension of the typical Hibernian, who, in earlier telegraphic times, wasted the better part of a day in watching for the passage of a veritable letter over the wires; but even now,—­after twenty years of Electric Telegraphy, during which the progress of the magic wire has been so rapid that it has already reached an extent of nearly sixty thousand miles in the United States alone,—­even now the ideas of men in general as to the modus operandi of this great agency are, to say the least, extremely vague.  Even the chronic and pamphlet-producing quarrel between the managers of our telegraphic system and their Briarean antagonist, the daily-newspaper-press, fails to convey to our general sense anything beyond the impression that the most gigantic benefits may be so abused as to tempt us into an occasional wish that they had never existed.