ial. He is to convert all impediments into
instruments, all enemies into power. The formidable mischief will only
make the more useful slave. And if one shall read the future of the race
hinted in the organic effort of Nature to mount and meliorate, and the
corresponding impulse to the Better in the human being, we shall dare
affirm that there is nothing he will not overcome and convert, until at
last culture shall absorb the chaos and gehenna. He will convert the
Furies into Muses, and the hells into benefit.'

SPHINX AND OEDIPUS.

Why poets should sing of this WAR
In rapturous anthems of praise,
I know not. Its meanings so jar,
Its purpose hath so many ways,
The SPHINX never readeth the whole.
'Tis a riddle propounded to me
That I am unskillful to tell.
The Sphinx by the way-side, I see,
Is watching (I know her so well)
To mangle us, body and soul.

Is it 'Freedom, that Bondage may live,'
Which cheers on the North to the fray?
Is it 'Slavery more Freedom to give,'
That slogans the Southern foray?
She asks, and awaits your reply:
Now answer, ye _marshal_-bred bands
Whose business is murder and blood;
Ye priests with incarnadined hands;
Ye peace-men who 'fight for the good;'
Now solve her this riddle or die!

'Our Flag,' the conservative says,
'Waves over the land of the free;'
God save us!--I think many ways,
But still 'tis a riddle to me,
Whose mystery is hid from the eye;
But Oedipus, showing the souls
All fettered, imbruted and blained,
Who point where its blazonry rolls,
And wail the sad plaint of the chained,--
Asserts, 'There is, somewhere, a lie.'

THE ACTRESS WIFE.

I had been sent by my New York employers to superintend a branch of
their business in a southern city. On the evening of a brilliant
Sabbath, as I walked musingly through the cemetery, where thousands of
the city's dead had found a calm and sequestered resting place, my
attention was drawn to a monumental structure, the character and
symbolism of which defied my comprehension. On a grassy mound, in a
grove of oak trees, almost concealing it from observation, rose a
mausoleum of dark stone, which at the first glance I conjectured to
represent a Druidical temple. At the four corners were the carved
resemblances of oak trees, the trunks forming columns for the structure,
and the limbs branching out, intertwining above into a graceful
ne