a regular, long-drawn, and truly pleasing melody, that in spite of his hoarse, and I am afraid, drunken voice, I used to wish for it of an evening, and hail it when it came.  It lasted for some years, then faded, and went out; I suppose, with the poor old weather-beaten fellow’s existence.  This sense of quiet and repose may have been increased by an early association of Chelsea with something out of the pale; nay, remote.  It may seem strange to hear a man who has crossed the Alps talk of one suburb as being remote from another.  But the sense of distance is not in space only; it is in difference and discontinuance.  A little back-room in a street in London is further removed from the noise, than a front room in a country town.  In childhood, the farthest local point which I reached anywhere, provided it was quiet, always seemed to me a sort of end of the world; and I remembered particularly feeling this, the only time when I had previously visited Chelsea, which was at that period of life....  I know not whether the corner I speak of remains as quiet as it was.  I am afraid not; for steamboats have carried vicissitude into Chelsea, and Belgravia threatens it with her mighty advent.  But to complete my sense of repose and distance, the house was of that old-fashioned sort which I have always loved best, familiar to the eyes of my parents, and associated with childhood.  It had seats in the windows, a small third room on the first floor, of which I made a sanctum, into which no perturbation was to enter, except to calm itself with religious and cheerful thoughts (a room thus appropriated in a house appears to me an excellent thing;) and there were a few lime-trees in front, which in their due season diffused a fragrance.

[Footnote 1:  The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt.  Two volumes.  Harper & Brothers. 1850.]

* * * * *

LAMARTINE’S new romance.

The great poet of affairs, philosophy, and sentiment, before leaving the scenes of his triumphs and misfortunes for his present visit to the East, confided to the proprietors of Le Constitutionel a new chapter of his romanticized memoirs to be published in the feuilleton of that journal, under the name of “Genevieve.”  This work, which promises to surpass in attractive interest anything Lamartine has given to the public in many years, will be translated as rapidly as the advanced sheets of it are received here, by Mr. Fayette Robinson, whose thorough apprehension and enjoyment of the nicest delicacies of the French language, and free and manly style of English, qualify him to do the fullest justice to such an author and subject.  His version of “Genevieve” will be issued, upon its completion, by the publishers of The International.  We give a specimen of its quality in the following characteristic description, of Marseilles, premising that the work is dedicated to “Mlle. Reine-Garde, seamstress, and formerly a servant, at Aix, in Provence.”