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For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor when we have to pay commission for forwarding the money; nor when we club the LIVING Age with another periodical. An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & GAY. HOME-SPUN SONGS. BY SAMUEL SLICK, JUNR." WAITING FOR YOU, JOCK. The streams are a-flowing; Will soon be in view. As soon as the day's done, My thoughts to the west run; That sinks from my view. I sigh when the day beams, To cheer me with sweet dreams, That bear me to you. Each morn as you flee me, Go, robin, fly to him, Bid him be true! Where he sleeps on the prairies, The American thrush. AFEARED OF A GALL. Her voice is sweet as the whipporwill's Sister Sall don't like this word. Says it's only fit for stockings, and suchlike. But it can't be helped. The country folks are great at darning. They will "darn," and that's all about it.-S. S. Jr. From Blackwood's Magazine. TWO ACTS OF SELF-DEVOTION. the journey feels like, and yet we are as- ing we shall one day stand ourselves: no No writer of fiction gratifies this desire THERE is little need to explain at any length why death-scenes, so sad to witness, are so interesting to read of. The fact is at any rate well known, and has been abundantly traded on by second-rate poets and novelists. Their favourite plan of introducing us to an innocent young victim whose chief use (if rather tedious in life) is to beguile us of our tears on a sentimental death-bed, has been often justly censured. This device, too, defeats its own end; for a thing which has scarcely lived cannot with any propriety of language be said to die. But when we are reading the description of a statesman's demeanour on the scaffold, or of a warrior breathing his last on a hardly-conquered field, the added interest with which we view the close of that career which we have been surveying throughout its progress, is perfectly legitimate. Nor can historian or biographer engrave their words at any time more deeply on our memories than when they are placing before us a man who is about (as Plutarch says*) to flee from that altar of Life which has ceased to afford him protection, in order to seek shelter at the more awful inner shrine of Death. This interest we do right to extend to similar passages in great works of fiction, whether prose or verse, because they are as true to the facts of nature as history and biography, often far truer. Thus most men could sooner forget the stirring fights of the Iliad than the death of Hector, the gar-free-will offering of a life on the altar of dens of Armida than the baptism of the dying Clorinda. For a death scene, not sentimentally tricked out with affected prettinesses, but truthfully and powerfully painted, stirs in us that sense of the sublime which belongs to the terrible when not near enough to alarm; it awakens reverential pity in our breasts; above all, it makes its appeal to one of man's strongest desires, his insatiable curiosity about the unknown. As we read we pursue with our eyes a traveller along that road where every footprint points forward; we know that he cannot turn back to tell us what Life of Demosthenes. And yet there is one omission in Shakespeare's death-scenes which, when we come to think of it, strikes us as hard to account for. None of his plays represents to us the noblest death of all-the faith, home, or country. His plays abound with fair types of maiden modesty and grace; but he neither emulates Euripides by making one of his young girls stand forth, timid yet resolute, to die for her fatherland, nor yet does he lead the way in which Calderon and Massinger were to follow, by picturing a virgin's readiness to die for her God. Shakespeare's wives are models, many of them, of submissive and loving devotion to their husbands; but there is among them no Alcestis who ransoms her lord's life with her own. Lady Macbeth by her fierce and unscrupulous courage, Hamlet by the task of vengeance imposed upon him, recall to |