ance must pay the
fiddler.' To be tied, forever, for better, for worse, to such a ---- as
Amina Ghoul, is to be transformed in one's whole nature. It is the
transmigration of a soul from amiability to peevishness, from activity
to discouragement, from love to hate, and from high-souled sentiment to
the dog-kennel of humility. Go thou, and don't do likewise.

'Woe is me! Who takes one wrong step, gets out of it by another; and so
I went on from enchantment to enchantment, and fell out of the
frying-pan into the fire. If I stood erect, and no longer groveled, if I
was not any more a beast, I became like the devils which possessed them.
So did I scourge and lash the object of my hatred with feelings of the
deadliest revenge.

'Oh, my Ben Hadad, presume not from my ultimate escape. If I have ceased
to snap and snarl and growl,--if I now, in the decline of life, pursue
the even tenor of my way,--if I have been redeemed from snares, and
learned even to forgive my enemies, it is because the fair Xarifa
represented my better nature, and that has triumphed because I took
counsel of her. Farewell, my son, and, in the pilgrimage of life,
reflect upon the dear-bought experience of SIDI NORMAN.'

* * * * *

'WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH US?'

What will we do with you, if God
Should give you over to our hands,
To pass in turn beneath the rod,
And wear at last the captive's bands?'
'What will we do?' Our very best
To make of each a glorious State,
Worthy to match with North and West,--
Free, vigorous, beautiful and great!
As God doth live, as Truth is true,
We swear we'll do all this to you.

* * * * *

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

A late _National Review_ asserts with true English shrewdness that
American literature is yet to be born,--that it has scarcely a
substantive existence. 'Its best works,' says this modern Scaliger, 'are
scarcely more than a promise of excellence; the precursors of an advent;
shadows cast before, and, like most shadows, they are too vague and
ill-defined, too fluctuating and easily distorted into grotesque forms,
to enable us to discriminate accurately the shape from which they are
flung.... The truth is, that American literature, apart from that of
England, has no separate existence.... The United States have yet to
sign their intellectual Declaration of Independence: they are mentally
still only a province of t