t of chopped-up meat, neatly
shaped to represent those birds; peddlers of sweet-meats sell
marshmallow paste made out of Spanish white; the fish-merchant inserts
the eyes of a fresh mackerel in a stale turbot, to trick his sharp
customers; and as to drinks, one dyer boldly puts over his door
"Burgundy Vintages!" They make marble of pasteboard and diamonds
of glass. Adulteration on adulteration, moans M. Veron, all is
adulteration!

* * * * *

The problem of aerial navigation seems at present to be agitating as
many pseudo-scientific minds as did that of perpetual motion not many
years ago, or the philosopher's stone at a more remote period. It
possesses perhaps a still stronger attraction in the danger connected
with the experiments--the source, we suppose, of the eagerness shown
by Professor Wise and his associates to _fly_ to evils that they
know not of. Perpetual motion received its quietus from the blasts of
ridicule. Air-voyaging has a worse foe to encounter. It may survive
the attacks of gayety, but it will succumb, we fancy, to the
resistless force of _gravity_.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Scintillations from the Prose Works of Heinrich Heine. New York: Holt
& Williams.

The task formerly undertaken by Mr. Charles Godfrey Leland, in
adapting to our language the songs of Heine, is now well supplemented
with some versions from among his prose works by another Philadelphian
translator, Mr. Simon Adler Stern. Heine's prose, delicate in its
pellucid brightness as any of his poetry, cannot be held too precious
by the interpreter. The latter must have all his wits about him, or he
will not find English at once simple enough and distinguished enough
to stand for the original. To get at Heine's prose exactly in another
language must be almost as hard as to get at his poetry. The principal
selection made by Mr. Stern is a long rambling rhapsody called
"Florentine Nights," in which the author professes to pour into the
ears of a dying mistress the history of some of his former amours and
exaltations, the natural jealousy of the listener going for a stimulus
in the recital. His first love, however, is an idealization--a Greek
statue which he visits by moonlight, as Sordello in Browning's poem
does the

Shrinking Caryatides
Of just-tinged marble, like Eve's lilied flesh.

This weird love-ballad in prose must have taxed the translator almost
as much as