Mine eyes have scarcely closed their burning lids
  For many a night; and I have watch’d the stars
  That smiled upon me from the brow of heaven,
  Like deep blue orbs familiar to my youth;
  But now abstraction clouds me, and the fire—­
  Ambition’s fire—­it can be nothing less—­
  Deserts its lonely shrine; but I must give
  The last bright touch to this bewitching form,
  This pictured rainbow of my solitude! 
  I have invested her with loveliness
  More pure than beings of the earth assume,
  And Memory calls her beauteous image back
  From the forgotten things of distant years,
  Warm, eloquent, and holy, as the balm
  Of flow’rs impearl’d with dew, which summer skies
  Diffuse around—­I mark the marble brow
  Of polish’d symmetry, the eyes more blue
  Than violets in their vernal bloom, the neck
  Swanlike, and moulded with ethereal grace;
  And feel their magic influence on my mind. 
  I will embody them, and give the stamp
  Of fervid genius to their various charms,
  Ere this last aspiration is extinct
  In the unbroken slumbers of the tomb! 
  For I have had prophetic monitors
  To warn me of my fate, and I must leave
  All that is lovely in this lovely world.

  It is a summer eve—­the sunbeams tinge
  The glassy bosom of the quiet lake;
  The music of the birds enchants the air,
  And Nature’s verdant robe is gemm’d with flow’rs. 
  From which the breeze derives its liquid balm. 
  Oh! in my youth, this hour has been to me
  Bright as the fairy arch upon the clouds
  Of earthly grief and gloom, and even now
  It gives the silent fountain of my heart
  A renovated action, and recalls
  The energies that long ago were mine. 
  My fancy wanders as I thus portray
  The lineaments on which ’tis bliss to gaze: 
  How beautiful their prototype! to whom
  I breath’d in youth the most impassion’d words,
  And felt as if Elysium had disclosed
  Its glory to my eye—­around this brow,
  Stainless as marble, cluster golden curls
  Like sunbeams on the bosom of the cloud,
  And o’er the radiant azure orbs beneath,
  The snowy lids suspend their glossy fringe. 
  Upon such beauty shall my pencil stamp
  Its immortality, and make it seem
  More beautiful in Fancy’s softest glow;
  And, my beloved! when this warm hand that traced
  Thy pictured charms is mouldering in the dust,
  Thou wilt proclaim the painter’s mastery,
  And consecrate the canvass with a power
  Which shall defy the wasting hand of Time!

G.R.C.

* * * * *

PRESERVATION OF A HUMAN BODY.

In a vault under the Font of the Old Church of St. Dunstan in the West, has lately been discovered the leaden coffin of a “Mr. Moody,” (without a Christian name,) who “died in the year 1747, aged 70 years.”  After this interment of 85 years, the face was found not decomposed, but perfect; the mouth extended—­the teeth and eye-brows unimpaired, and to the touch, the flesh solid (covered with a cloth) and no appearance of worms; which puzzles the common opinion that such insects prey upon the dead: