See how yon beam of seeming white
  Is braided out of seven-hued light,
  Yet in those lucid gloves no ray
  By any chance shall break astray. 
  Hark how the rolling surge of sound,
  Arches and spirals circling round,
  Wakes the hushed spirit through thine ear
  With music it is heaven to hear.

  Then mark the cloven sphere that holds
  All thoughts in its mysterious folds,
  That feels sensation’s faintest thrill
  And flashes for the sovereign will;
  Think on the stormy world that dwells
  Locked in its dim and clustering cells! 
  The lightning gleams of power it sheds
  Along its hollow glassy threads!

  O Father! grant thy love divine
  To make these mystic temples thine! 
  When wasting age and wearying strife
  Have sapped the leaning walls of life,
  When darkness gathers over all,
  And the last tottering pillars fall,
  Take the poor dust thy mercy warms
  And mould it into heavenly forms!

* * * * *

LITERARY NOTICES.

Library of Old Authors.—­Works of John Marston.  London:  John Russell Smith. 1856-7.

Mr. Halliwell, at the close of his Preface to the Works of Marston, (Vol.  I. p. xxii.,) says, “The dramas now collected together are reprinted absolutely from the early editions, which were placed in the hands of our printers, who thus had the advantage of following them without the intervention of a transcriber.  They are given as nearly as possible in their original state, the only modernizations attempted consisting in the alternations of the letters i and j, and u and v, the retention of which” (does Mr. Halliwell mean the letters or the “alternations"?) “would have answered no useful purpose, while it would have unnecessarily perplexed the modern reader.”

This not very clear; but as Mr. Halliwell is a member of several learned foreign societies, and especially of the Royal Irish Academy, perhaps it would he unfair to demand that he should write clear English.  As one of Mr. Smith’s editors, it was to be expected that he should not write it idiomatically.  Some malign constellation (Taurus, perhaps, whose infaust aspect may be supposed to preside over the makers of bulls and blunders) seems to have been in conjunction with heavy Saturn when the Library was projected.  At the top of the same page from which we have made our quotation, Mr. Halliwell speaks of “conveying a favorable impression on modern readers.”  It was surely to no such phrase as this that Ensign Pistol alluded when he said, “Convey the wise it call.”