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Wrought to the grace of nice Perfection's thumb,
Temple and palace, tower and column rise,
And gild in prospect grand the ocean-lap.

Vast troops of mermen, wandering through the deep, Upon its slimy bed, what wealthy prey

The rav'nous waves devour seize on, and pour
The lusty heap into the city's mouth.

Ah! many a galleon proud they've made disgorge

Its golden entrails: many a brigantine,

That slept as gently on th' unstable couch,

As clouds upon the air; and many a ship,
That rode the wat'ry mountains undismayed,
And mocked the lightnings, and the stormy skies,
Vainly, rock-pierced, submerged, have been their prey,
To deck their Ocean-Queen. The marble corpse,
The empty temple of a spirit fled,

Tombed in the sea-weed, 'scaped the fishes' maw,
Yields like a jeweled god to sacrilege.

Unsepulchred the spurned clay moulders; but
The casket gemmed, the diamond couched in gold,
The glittering watchman from the walls of time,
The bags of coin, which th' avaricious grasp―
Who sell their lives unto the ruthless floods,
And bear themselves the yellow payment down-
These crown the glutted coffers of the sea.
The cannon merciless, whose fiery heart
Has lost its throbbings by the quenching brine;
Drowned are the thunders of its iron voice,
Which, 'bove the salt floor eloquent, 'most shook
The starry spangles, from the gates of Heaven,
Worlds from their suns; the keen-edged damaskin,
The ancient cuirass, brigandine, and helm,
That saw the Roman eagles ride the winds,
Which with their cooling pinions fan the world;
Ponderous missives, deadlier than the wrath
Cyclopean anvils lent to Jove's right hand;
Proud banners, lettered pennons, showy plumes,
Aye, our own star-crowned, eagle-ensign, too,
Now dabbled in the liquor of the sea,
And all its lustre spoiled; the instruments,
That stir the soldier's courage, with the notes

Of boist'rous drum, and trumpet braying loud,
With all the dread machinery of Mars;
These fill the armory of the greedy sea,

A useless glory to th' unmartial race.

Here woman reigns. The potent queen, as Heaven Benign, and as the eye of morning fair,

With virtue, meekness, innocence, and love,
Assault the strong embrasures of man's heart-
The manly heart throws wide its willing gates,
While in a thousand blissful smiles we read
Her triumphs of success. There, too, beneath
The foaming crown of waters woman reigns.
But, strange! superior qualities of mind,
The masc'line essence to their souls transfused,
And utter lack of godlike dignity,

Where shame succeeds, if dignity be not,

These give domestic sceptres to the dames,
Wherewith to teach submission in their mates.
Who go, as does the scourged slave to his task,
With heads depending on their hairless beasts,
And many a doleful sigh, forth to their toils,
And daily wanderings, soon as the Sun,
With chariot laden with th' unrisen day,
Wheels from his gates beyond the city walls,
And eyes his noontide goal. Perched on a hill,
Whose brows o'ershade the city in awful lustre
The Sun's great palace flames. The monarch ne'er
Within th' imperial city rides; whose queen,

Whilst Fear and Horror, armed with scourge and spear,
Sweep through the crowded arteries, arm in arm,
Forbids his coursers fiery hoofs to sear

Her pavements, lest dire Conflagration rise,
And with her thousand tongues lick up the town,
Of stone though structured, and by Neptune watched.
Some tend vast herds throughout the oozy fields;
Some from the bowels of the coral hills

Dig palace walls, or hew the manly shaft,
The virgin architrave, and frieze, or left
Them their seats; some, in unwritten ways,
Through acres submarine, with urgent limbs,
Scour, and a golden harvest reap; which, piled
And garnered daily in their mistress' laps,
Forbearance wins, and gentle looks, and love,
If love, ethereal virtue of angelic minds,
Could ever light those dungeon-breasted dames,
Who scourge for pastime, whom by Nature's strict
Decree they should acknowledge lords; whilst they
Rejoice in ease, on sumptuous couches laid,
(The scaly terminations of their forms,
Sprouting from human, loathe an upright seat,)
'Neath Luxury's rich pavilion, at her board,
To Time's dull, leaded flight add golden rings,
And sated Pleasure crown with bays of song.

They have a Queen, who, like the sovereign lady, That of the honored nation's city, holds

The tiny throne and sceptre, is the mother

General of the mermal swarm, the eye,

That scans each throbbing of the general pulse,
Its current healing. Like Hyppolyta's,
Famed mistress of Mars' glory zone, and queen
Of single-breasted maids, unhusbanded,
Abhorring men, her words are statues firm
Binding the state; her will, the legislature,
Fixing the reign of Justice and their Gods;
And, graced with eloquence, though dumb, her arm,
With gentle wave, conveys a mightier wave
Of joy or sorrow o'er th' obedient realm.
She has a palace from the city's core,
Whose flaming foreheads front to every wall,
To frown rebellion and base tumult down

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Where cormorant and bittern build their nests,

And satyrs howl a nation's requiem,

Though erst Edumea's sons there braved the world,

Within their excavated bosoms boast

No shadow of such grandeur. When the Russians,
Fur-clad and shaggy, on the Finland coast
Hewed for imperial Catharine a home

Out of the marble waters, she'd not heard of
This ocean-palace, else her great empire
Had slept a frozen burden on the wave.
Annihilation seems to seize on all
Beneath its pillared porches; from on high
Amazement, brooding o'er the roof sublime,
Awes with returning glance the gazing soul.
Close 'neath its roof th' eyes' shrinking shutter creeps;
Wide-spread th' iv'ry portals of the mouth;
And the astonished fingers, high upreared,
Point to all quarters of the Stars' blue throne.
How shall I paint thy beauties, palace? How
Describe the wonders of thy matchless form?
Interior and exterior thou dost bear,
In golden soil, crops of supernal flowers,
Gemmed rarer than Golconda's coronet,
So multiform and curious, that the eye
Of upper man ne'er rests on such delights.
Who carved those rich mosaics? Who impressed
Those speaking emblems in thy coral walls,
Historic emblems of a distant age,

Of pearl and conch, and figured gold inwrought,

Thy lineage long, and story of thy queens?

A thousand suns blaze o'er thee, when the flames Of naphtha and bitumen, calx and nard,

A mixture aromatic, and defies

Fire's liquid foe, prey on the nightly censers,
Hung multitudinous, that from their lips,
Flamif'rous, breathe a cloud of pure aroma,
Which, though the wat'ry atmosphere diffused,
Conveys and offers to th' admiring sense
A burden of delight. Oh! for a pen,
With inspiration burning, fresh from heaven,
To character in fire thy lustrous Queen,
By far the fairest of this fairy race,
Transcendent: she, in state or pastime sweet,
Among her courtly ladies peerless moves,
As Luna 'midst the star-eyed troops above.
When Calm, peace-bearing power, her potent arm
Sweeps o'er the troubled bosom of the sea,
Smoothing its tumult, with a nymphly train,
She to the threshold of her kingdom mounts,
Where air and ocean battle in the storm.
Now ocean smiles on them, disporting wide,
Some in the element, and some reclined

On shells, sea-chariots, and by dolphins drawn,
All beauteous. Heaven rebounds their joyful peals.
But as the Nautilus, before the breeze

Exulting at the distant tread of man,

Furls all her canvas, and o'erwhelms her bark;

So when they feel, though sight compels them not,

The slightest ripple of approaching sail,

With sudden fright they gather in their shouts,

And silent hasten to their safe retreat.

Thus have I faintly pictured, what had else,

Had not a spirit told it in mine ear,
Defied belief; that ocean-dwelling city,
Magnificent; its semi-human race;

Their wondrous mode of living submarine;

And their strange manners, customs, government. Herein is much, that seems to give the lie

To simple Nature, as she dwells with us;

But, critic, know, earth, heaven, and sea yet hold Food for philosophy, and Isaac Newton.

ISTS AND ISMS.

THE present age has been, not inappropriately, styled "an age of isms." New-fangled notions and gossamer theories are as plenty as mushrooms after a long rain, and many of them quite as unsubstantial and ephemeral. They often remind one of the gourd of Jonah-very pleasant and refreshing shades for the fancy to revel in, but withered and burnt up the moment they come into the light of practice. Every conceited blockhead who pants after notoriety, but without the slightest chance of gaining it by legitimate means, now sets on foot some unheard-of theory-the more wild and impracticable the better-forthwith claps an ism to the end of his name, and is lauded to the skies by a gaping multitude. There is a class of men, and not a small one, who, like the crowds of the Areopagus, " spend their time in nothing else but either to tell or hear some new thing." And while the name of these isms is legion, their character is as motley as their number is great. We have Fourierists, who would cast the elements of society and government into the boiling caldron of anarchy, and, by some weird-like spells, spirit up a "new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness;" Agrarians, who would give every man a piece of God's earth big enough to yield him food, and clothing, and a penny to lay by for a rainy day;" Peace-men, who are trying with the silken, but strong cords of Love, to fetter the gory wheels of that Juggernaut, under which so many myriads of deluded humanity have been crushed; and Abolitionists, who would strike off the manacles of the slave, and bid the down-trodden and oppressed go free. We have, too, those who would, by a new system of spelling, turn our good old English tongue into an inexplicable jargon-if we may use the expression, "knock it into a cocked hat;" and then we suppose they want the old folks to go to school again to learn their letters; and last, but not least, we have ists in religion, of every hue and grade, from the Swedenborgian transcendentalist, reveling in the etherialized felicities of a Mesmeric Heaven, to the Millerite fanatic, who, fancying he hears afar off the last dread trump, soars away from the house-top in robes of white, and to his amazement finds himself rather unceremoniously landed on uncivil terra firma. And, as if all this were not enough, Mesmerism must give us "a new Bible," and invest the preachings of human reason with the authority of revelation.

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The characteristics of these isms are well worthy of inspection, for they are the characteristics of the age-the outward indices of a deep and mighty working of the great human mind. In general we notice they are bold and independent. Their very extravagance indicates their originality and excursiveness of thought. They take no man for their god-father-no creed for their compass-but strike out fearlessly on the broad ocean of thought, heedless of ancient landmarks. The barriers that prejudice and superstition once raised effectually against new notions and theories, are now quietly demolished by the repeated and

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