, or to praise
either. I always feel as if I were a cobbler, putting new
top-leathers to an old pair of boot-soles and bodies, when I am
fitting sentiments to these venerable jingles.

. . . . youth
. . . . . morning
. . . . . truth
. . . . . warning

Nine tenths of the "Juvenile Poems" written spring out of the above
musical and suggestive coincidences.

"Yes?" said our landlady's daughter.

I did not address the following remark to her, and I trust, from
her limited range of reading, she will never see it; I said it
softly to my next neighbour.

When a young female wears a flat circular side--curl, gummed on
each temple,--when she walks with a male, not arm in arm, but his
arm against the back of hers,--and when she says "Yes?" with the
note of interrogation, you are generally safe in asking her what
wages she gets, and who the "feller" was you saw her with.

"What were you whispering?" said the daughter of the house,
moistening her lips, as she spoke, in a very engaging manner.

"I was only laying down a principle of social diagnosis."

"Yes?"

--It is curious to see how the same wants and tastes find the same
implements and modes of expression in all times and places. The
young ladies of Otaheite, as you may see in Cook's Voyages, had a
sort of crinoline arrangement fully equal in radius to the largest
spread of our own lady-baskets. When I fling a Bay-State shawl
over my shoulders, I am only taking a lesson from the climate that
the Indian had learned before me. A BLANKET-shawl we call it, and
not a plaid; and we wear it like the aborigines, and not like the
Highlanders.

--We are the Romans of the modern world,--the great assimilating
people. Conflicts and conquests are of course necessary accidents
with us, as with our prototypes. And so we come to their style of
weapon. Our army sword is the short, stiff, pointed gladius of the
Romans; and the American bowie-knife is the same tool, modified to
meet the daily wants of civil society. I announce at this table an
axiom not to be found in Montesquieu or the journals of Congress:-

The race that shortens its weapons lengthens its boundaries.

Corollary. It was the Polish LANCE that left Poland at last with
nothing of her own to bound.

"Dropped from her nerveless grasp the SHATTERED SPEAR!"

What business had Sarmatia to be fighting for liberty with a
fifteen-foot pole