sire to please, inherent in
the female breast, seems to have expired in them, for their dress
betrays a total neglect, and its fashion is that of some forty years
ago. Even the youthful are equally negligent, which indicates their
conviction that the men they meet seldom notice them, proving the truth
of the old saying, that women dress to please men.

The old, with locks of snow, who had grown into senility in this
erudite quarter, still paced the same promenade which they had trodden
for many a year, habit having fixed them where hope once led their
steps. The middle-aged, too, might be seen with hair beginning to
blanch from long hours devoted to the midnight lamp, and faces marked
with "the pale cast of thought." Hope, though less sanguine in her
promises, still lures them on, and they pass the venerable old,
unconscious that they themselves are succeeding them in the same life
of study, to be followed by the same results, privation, and solitude,
until death closes the scene. And yet a life of study is, perhaps, the
one in which the privations compelled by poverty are the least felt to
be a hardship.

Study, like virtue, is its own exceeding great reward, for it engrosses
as well as elevates the mind above the sense of the wants so acutely
felt by those who have no intellectual pursuits; and many a student has
forgotten his own privations when reading the history of the great and
good who have been exposed to even still more trying ones. Days pass
uncounted in such occupations. Youth fleets away, if not happily, at
least tranquilly, while thus employed; and maturity glides into age,
and age drops into the grave, scarcely conscious of the gradations of
each, owing to the mind having been filled with a continuous train of
thought, engendered by study.

I have been reading some French poems by Madame Amabel Tastu; and very
beautiful they are. A sweet and healthy tone of mind breathes through
them, and the pensiveness that characterises many of them, marks a
reflecting spirit imbued with tenderness. There is great harmony, too,
in the versification, as well as purity and elegance in the diction.
How much some works make us wish to know their authors, and _vice
versa_! I feel, while reading her poems, that I should like Madame
Amabel Tastu; while other books, whose cleverness I admit, convince me
I should not like the writers.

A book must always resemble, more or less, its author. It is the mind,
or at least a por