down into their places. Multitudes
of men are incessantly employed for many weeks in arranging the limbs
and members of the monster, and in screwing and bolting every thing into
its place. Still nothing can be tried. The machinery is too ponderous
and massive to be put in action by any power less than that of the
mighty mover on which its ultimate performance is to depend; and this
mover has not yet been called into being.

At length the day of trial arrives. The engineers, the workmen, the
owners, and perhaps many spectators, have assembled to watch the result.
The boiler is filled; the fires are lighted. Hour after hour the process
goes on of raising the force and pressure of the steam. All this time,
however, the machinery lies inert and lifeless. It is a powerless mass
of dead and heavy brass and iron. At length an engineer, standing upon a
platform, with a lever in his hand, receives the signal, opens the
valve, and breathes into the monstrous body the breath of life. The
ponderous piston slowly rises; the beam descends; the crank turns; the
vast paddles revolve, and the monster walks away through the water with
its enormous burden, having leaped suddenly, at its first breath, into
the complete and full possession of its gigantic powers.

[Illustration: DEPARTURE OF THE PACIFIC FOR EUROPE.]

In due time the equipment is complete, and the ship having received on
board its burden of costly cargo and valuable lives, moves away from
the shore, with a certain expression of calm and quiet dignity in her
appearance and demeanor, which almost seems to denote a consciousness on
her part of the vast responsibilities which she is assuming, and of the
abundant power which she possesses fully to sustain them all.

CHARLES WOLFE.

It is probable that to many of our readers the name which stands at the
head of this sketch is unknown, and that those who recognize it will
only know it as that of the author of the well-known lines upon the
death of Sir John Moore--a lyric of such surpassing beauty, that so
high a judge as Lord Byron considered it the perfection of English
lyrical poetry, preferring it before Coleridge's lines on
Switzerland--Campbell's Hohenlinden--and the finest of Moore's Irish
melodies, which were instanced by Shelley and others. Yet, unknown as
the Rev. Charles Wolfe is, it is unquestionable that he was a man
possessing the highest powers of imagination, and a powerful intellect,
cultivated to a ver