The sardine in his oily den, his little house of tin,
  Headless and heedless there he lies, no move of tail or fin,
  Yet full as beauteous, I ween, that press’d and prison’d fish,
  As when in sunny seas he swam unbroken to the dish.

  A unit in the vasty world of waters far away,
  We could nor taste his toothsome form, nor watch his merry play,
  But, prison’d thus, to fancy’s eye, he brings his native seas,
  The olive-groves of Southern France—­perchance the Pyrenees.

  The brown sails of the fishing-boats, the lithe sea-season’d crew,
  The spray that shakes the sunlight off beneath the breezy blue,
  The netted horde that shames the light with their refulgent sheen—­
  Such charm the gods who dwell on high have given the chill sardine.

  So when we find long leagues of smoke compacted in the air,
  ’Tis not the philosophic part to murmur or to swear,
  But patiently unravelling, the threads will soon appear,
  In cottage hearths, and burning weeds, and misty woodland sere.

  The day is fading, all the West with sunset’s glow is bright,
  And island clouds of crimson float in depths of emerald light,
  Like circles on a rippled lake the tints spread up the sky,
  Till, mingling with the purple shade, they touch night’s shore, and die.

  Down where the beech-trees, nearly bare, spread o’er the red-leaf’d hill,
  Where yet late-lingerers patter down, altho’ the wind is still,
  The cottage smoke climbs thinly up, and shades the black-boled trees,
  And hangs upon the misty air as blue as summer seas.

  ’Tis this, in other guise, that wraps the town in sombre pall,
  While like two endless funerals the lines of traffic crawl,
  And from the abysmal vagueness where flows the turbid stream
  Like madden’d nightmares neighing, the steamers hoarsely scream.

  The Arab yearns for deserts free, the mariner for grog,
  The hielan’ laddie treads the heath, the croppy trots the bog;
  The Switzer boasts his avalanche, the Eskimo his dog,
  But only London in the world, can show a London fog.

* * * * *

A WONDERFUL SHILLINGSWORTH.

My Dear Mr. Punch,—­Fresh from the country (which has been my perpetual residence for the last twenty years), I came to London, a few days ago, to visit an establishment which seemed to me to represent that delight of my childhood, the Polytechnic Institution, in the time of Professor PEPPER’s Ghost, and glass-blowing by machinery.  I need scarcely say that the Royal Aquarium was the attraction, where a shilling entrance fee I imagined would procure for me almost endless enjoyment.