Maria.  Yea, and the silence now Awakens him.  Ah, darling rogue, art flushed With too much comfort?  So! let the cool air Play with thy curls and fan the plump, hot cheek.

Raphael.  Hold, as the child uplifts his cherub face, Opens his soft small arms to stroke thy cheek, Crowing with glee, while the slant sunbeams light A halo of gold fire about thy hair, I see again a canvas that is hung Over the altar in our church at home. “Mater amabilis,” yet here be traits, Colors and tones the artist never dreamed.  Sweet mother, let me sketch thee with thy babe:  So rare a picture should not pass away With the brief moment which it illustrates.

  Maria.  Art thou a painter too, Sir Traveler? 
  Where be thy brush and colors?

  Raphael.  Ah, ’tis true,
  Naught have I with me.  What is this? ’twill serve
  My purpose.

  Maria.  ’Tis the cover of a cask,
  Made of the very oak whereof I spake: 
  My father for his wine-casks felled the tree.

Raphael.  A miracle! the hermit’s daughters thus Will be remembered in the years to come.  My pencil will suffice to scratch the lines Upon the wood:  my memory will hold The lights, the tints, the golden atmosphere, The genius of the scene—­the mother-love.

EMMA LAZARUS.

EARLY TRAVELING EXPERIENCES IN INDIA.

In August, 1849, when I had been living at Calcutta nearly three years, I was warned by my doctor that I must go on a sea-voyage or else to the Himalaya Mountains, if life was an object with me.  Such it was, and very keenly.  The four-and-twenty years of it which I had divided between study and rollicking had approved themselves, like this poor old world when it was new, “very good,” and I had a strong objection to parting with it on so short an acquaintance.  True, my hepatic apparatus, as the doctors grandly call the liver, had got miserably out of gear, though I was a water-drinker, and though I had a wholesome horror of tropical sunshine.  But I had a good constitution, and I had the word of the medical faculty for it that many a man with not half so good a one as mine had pulled through a much worse condition than I was in.  To go away somewhere, however, was proposed as my only alternative to migrating down to the hideous cemetery among the bogs and jackals of Chowringhee.  But where should I go?  After having been shot once and drowned twice when a boy, I had been ship-wrecked at the mouth of the sacred and accursed Ganges, and had just escaped with my life and Greek lexicon.  Shooting—­and I may throw in hanging—­I felt proof against, and as for drowning, I had no fear of that.  Nevertheless, I had been very near five months in coming out from Boston under the blundering seamanship of Captain Coffin (ominous cognomen!), and salt water, hard junk and weevilly biscuit were as unattractive to me in possible prospect as they were in retrospect.  The sea I had weighed in the balance and had found it much wanting.  I would, then, go to the Himalayas.