heart-tribute--and I could almost
love her for the unselfishness with which she drew the shrinking form
closer to her bosom. I would have given the world to have learned that
girl's previous history. I am sure _accident_ must have thrown her
amongst her present associates, as I have seen a lily broken from its
stem by a sudden gust of wind, and flung to wither and die amid rude
and hardy weeds. In a few hours the party left the boat, and I never
saw either her or them again; but, till this day, whenever any
incident of a domestic nature wakens old-time dreams, pleasant
memories of that beautiful exile, weeping over the music of her lost
Eden, and of the kind old woman caressing her, and kissing off the
falling tears, creep together, and form a lovely picture of _home and
heaven-born love_.

MARGINALIA.

BY EDGAR A. POE.

That punctuation is important all agree; but how few comprehend the
extent of its importance! The writer who neglects punctuation, or
mis-punctuates, is liable to be misunderstood--this, according to the
popular idea, is the sum of the evils arising from heedlessness or
ignorance. It does not seem to be known that, even where the sense is
perfectly clear, a sentence may be deprived of half its force--its
spirit--its point--by improper punctuation. For the want of merely a
comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a
sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.

There is _no_ treatise on the topic--and there is no topic on which a
treatise is more needed. There seems to exist a vulgar notion that the
subject is one of pure conventionality, and cannot be brought within
the limits of intelligibly and consistent _rule_. And yet, if fairly
looked in the face, the whole matter is so plain that its _rationale_
may be read as we run. If not anticipated, I shall, hereafter, make an
attempt at a magazine paper on "The Philosophy of Point."

In the meantime let me say a word or two of _the dash_. Every writer
for the press, who has any sense of the accurate, must have been
frequently mortified and vexed at the distortion of his sentences by
the printer's now general substitution of a semicolon, or comma, for
the dash of the MS. The total or nearly total disuse of the latter
point, has been brought about by the revulsion consequent upon its
excessive employment about twenty years ago. The Byronic poets were
_all_ dash. John Neal, in his earlier novels, exaggerated its use into
the gro