igure and a picture, as he is afterward painted,--

"Fair-haired, blue-eyed, his aspect blithe,
His figure tall and straight and lithe,"--

which recall the Norwegian magician, Ole Bull. He plays to the listening
group of friends. Of these there is the landlord,--a youth of quiet
ways, "a student of old books and days,"--a young Sicilian,--"a Spanish
Jew from Alieant,"--

"A theologian, from the school
Of Cambridge on the Charles,"--

then a poet, whose portrait, exquisitely sketched and meant for quite
another, will yet be prized by the reader, as the spectator prizes, in
the Uffizi at Florence, the portraits of the painters by themselves:--

"A poet, too, was there, whose verse
Was tender, musical, and terse:
The inspiration, the delight,
The gleam, the glory, the swift flight
Of thoughts so sudden that they seem
The revelations of a dream,
All these were his: but with them came
No envy of another's fame;
He did not find his sleep less sweet
For music in some neighboring street,
Nor rustling hear in every breeze
The laurels of Miltiades.
Honor and blessings on his head
While living, good report when dead,
Who, not too eager for renown,
Accepts, but does not clutch, the crown."

The musician completes the group.

When he stops playing, they call upon the landlord for his tale, which
he, "although a bashful man," begins. It is "Paul Revere's Ride,"
already known to many readers as a ballad of the famous incident in the
Revolution which has, in American hearts, immortalized a name which this
war has but the more closely endeared to them. It is one of the most
stirring, ringing, and graphic ballads in the language,--a proper
pendant to Browning's "How they brought the good news from Ghent to
Aix."

The poet, listening with eager delight, seizes the sword of the
landlord's ancestor which was drawn at Concord fight, and tells him that
his grandfather was a grander shape than any old Sir William,

"Clinking about in foreign lands,
With iron gauntlets on his hands,
And on his head an iron pot."

All laughed but the landlord,--

"For those who had been longest dead
Were always greatest in his eyes."

Did honest and dull "Conservatism" have ever a happier description? But
lest the immortal foes of Conservatism and Progress should come to
loggerheads in the conversation, the student opens his lips and breath