gant country house on the Hudson, where he enjoys every luxury that money can give him. After a pleasant rest, he starts again for Europe, pays more prodigious sums of money, returns with another brilliant troupe of artists, "manages again, and is again undone."

Now, neither of us, Dimes, has any objection whatever to an impresario making his fortune, but he really must not make it at the expense of the public. As long as he gives us an equivalent for our money we do not care if he pockets what is over. He has a right to be well paid for his trouble, and we are willing to pay him. But we do hope that when our Academy of Music does open, that we shall see operas produced there in a different style from those wretched things, mechanically speaking, that were palmed off on the public at Niblo's and Castle Garden last season. Who does not remember the one oak-tree at the old Astor Place House? No matter what was the opera, that inevitable tree made its appearance. It shaded Norma or concealed Donna Elvira with equal indifference. It represented a forest or a garden with the same audacity, and yet every opera-goer was familiar with every painted furrow on its canvas trunk. We have had quite enough of this sort of thing, Dimes. Most of us have seen the great European theatres, and know how things are managed there. There are plenty of capabilities in our future Academy of Music for the production of any opera on a suitable scale. The stage, although not as deep as it might be, is amply large enough for scenic effects, and in interior beauty of form, we do not think it will be surpassed by any theatre in the world. A good company, a trained orchestra, a conscientious management, prices not too low, and you, Dimes, in the boxes, with your velvet waistcoat and opal buttons, are all we lack to make the Fourteenth street Opera House a permanent success.

But why that exclamation, Dimes? What is it that so interests you? Ah! that is it! Yes! it is very prettily got up. "Cozzens's Wine-press." We know the clever editor, the most spirituel of wine merchants. It was a graceful thought, worthy of him, to throw, as it were, a veil of poetry about his business; and every page bears evidence of elegant tastes and extensive research. Look here, though, Dimes! Look what the second number of Cozzens's Wine-press discourses of. We pity you, O Fifth

avenue friend! Ten years hence, when the governor is dead, you will not be able to discourse about your Chateau Margaux of 1844, or your Chateau Lafitte of 1815. The vines of Europe are all dying of consumption, and the banks of the Rhine and plains of Marne will trickle with the glorious blood no more. A terrible disease called the "Oidium" has commenced once more to ravage the vines in the south of France, and so rapid are its attacks, that it is not stretching probability too far to suppose that, in the course of ten years, European wine will have virtually ceased to exist. What a frightful revelation for the restaurants. No more Jersey cider sold at two dollars a bottle as Heidsick, for it being known that Heidsick having ceased to be made, people will naturally argue that it cannot be sold. No more vinegar and leather parings under the title of Rudesheimer; no more logwood and water masquerading as "London Dock." tel keepers will be obliged to sell in despair natural, honest, excellent American wines, from Cincinnati, from North Carolina, and from the broad plains and slopes of Texas, which, in fifty years, will be the greatest wine country in the world. Dimes, if you have any spare thousands, go and buy up all the Latour and Lafitte you can, for you may outlive them, old fellow! and then what would become of the House of Dimes?

Ho

So Page has been doing wonders? Well, we expected as much. He has been painting Browning in Rome, and the author of "The Blot on the Scutcheon," says that it is better than anything that Titian ever painted. Browning, too, has an eye for a picture. He has too much observant poetry in him not to feel poetry on canvas when he saw it, and his opinion is worth much. Besides, Page has received a tribute from a brother artist, that is still more valuable. Crawford, the celebrated sculptor, ordered a portrait of his wife from Page, for which he agreed to give $500. When the picture was complete, he was so delighted with the execution, that he handed over $1000 to the successful artist, being double the sum originallly agreed upon. It is pleasant to see genius recognizing genius, and while it elevates the character of both, gives a terrible slap in the face to the old superstition about the habitual jealousies of artists.

You are rich, O Dimes. Go instantly and give Page $5000 for a picture of yourself. If you cannot become im

mortal any other way, that will do it.

But see! the Bard of the Orient enters. A snowy turban is wound about his head; a bournooz floats from his shoulders; a wondrous yataghan, old as the days of Haroon Alrazsheed, and probably forged with some eastern incantation, that made its edge resistless, dangles from a belt of Egyptian weaving. A glowing vest of Persian silk loosely encompasses his broad chest; while in the distance his dusky pipe-bearer is seen following, with the flexile tube of the narghilly twined around his arm. As the Bard nears the door of the sanctum, he stops, shuffles off his outer slippers on the threshold, and, joining his hands edgewise across his forehead, bows and murmurs the greeting, "Salaam Ale

koom!"

Dimes, amazed by this splendid apparition, is suddenly seized with a wild ambition to return the graceful salutation in kind, and, starting to his feet, vainly imitates the eastern prostration, though his silk waistcoat cracks in the effort. He jerks out eventually the words "Mashallah, Bismillah," which, being the only Turkish ejaculations he knows, must, in his opinion, form a perfectly satisfactory reply to the greeting.

"The day is sunny as those that gild the minarets of Stamboul, O Scribe!" said the Bard, seating himself crosslegged on the carpet that his pipe-bearer unrolled for him; "the wind is soft as if it were sifted through groves of a thousand palms; say, shall we plunge into the surfs that roll beside the Isle of Rabbits?"

We understood at once that the Bard wished to go and bathe on Coney Island, so replying after his own fashion, we said:

"Books are stale as the water that has travelled nine suns across the desert, O Minstrel of the East! The pen of the Scribe grows weary unless he sometimes dip it in the great ink-horn of nature. Let us go!"

We saw that Dimes wanted to come; we knew that our Fifth Avenue friend would give his favorite whisker to spend a day in company with the Desert Bard, so, accomplishing the necessary introductions, he was duly invited, and all three set off at a solemn and oriental pace for pier No. 4, North River.

Once installed upon the boat, taken our tickets, and got a shady corner to

ourselves, the Bard proceeded to make himself comfortable. His gorgeous carpet was unrolled, and folding his somewhat lengthy legs under him, he sank gracefully into an attitude of utter calm. The pipe-bearer, kneeling, presented the amber mouth-piece to his lips, and in a short time we saw him with half-closed eyes, breathing pale blue smoke, and, doubtless, dreaming of desert wells, and dusky maidens, who came there to fill their jars with the cool water.

Dimes looked on in wonder. He dared not sit cross-legged. His trousers lacked that luxurious looseness necessary to the achievement of the attitude. He dared not inhale so far into his lungs the fumes of the four cent Noriegas! He had no dreams of palm-fringed fountains, or girls of the wandering tribes. So Dimes sat upon a hard stool, and watched the Bard.

The evening was exquisitely cool. Through the barbican of Sandy-Hook, the breezes, scented with the salt Atlantic, swept inwards and stirred our hair. A party of the German Turnverein were on board, and their band of wind-instruments played wild waltzes in unison with the throbbing of the waves. Tall trees nodded on the Greenwood slopes, as we passed, like the funereal plumes of nature waving above the resting-places of the dead. White-sailed skiffs scudded along

the sea; the measured beat of oars throbbed across the harbor, from where some skipper passed to or from his ship. We all smoked and dreamed. None talked of the beauty of the scenery; even Dimes felt it too much to open his lips about it. The Bard we saw was far away in some wondrous land. But where? Toiling along the desert on his lean but blooded steed, with his eyes gloating on the golden sands, and his soul framing some wild lyric, through whose glowing verses rich caravans of thought wander? Or stretched on Lebanonian heights, with cedars waving above his head, olive-groves and gardens of roses at his feet, and some strange Armenian monk by his side, reciting thrilling legends of the Ausarai, and the wondrous spells of enchantment that they had saved from out of the deluge of the past, and yet preserved in their mountain holds? We know not. But on his countenance there sat a shadowy calm, and the glow of the orient seemed to shine upon his forehead.

So passed the hour, until the wheeling and maneuvering of the boat warned us that we had reached our destination.

We swung to the pier, on which Dimes and ourselves were the first to land, while the Bard swept slowly and majestically after, and then, all three marched along the sands. It is a wild place, that Isle of Rabbits, as the Bard calls it. Nakedly it bares its breast to the wild Atlantic; and the waves, with tireless strength, buffet it eternally. From long communion with the sea, it seems as if striving to imitate its undulations; and long billows of sand, flung up in rifts, and crowned with a green crest of slender grasses, stretch away over its surface like a nimic ocean. Even the wild ducks seem to shun it, as a place unfruitful for fowl, and, in Macedonian phalanx, fly far above it in search of succulent marshes where the salted weeds grow, and the soil oozes with a loamy fatness. What wondrous tunes that lonely isle must know! What wild diapasons of sound must burst upon it of dark windy nights. If the sea or the winds retain the burden of the terrible sorrows they witness, how mournful must be their songs on the Isle of Rabbits! Choral with the shrieks of drowning women; sharp with the split of the suddenly shivered sails; deep with the last hollow boom that echoes between the decks when the ship goes down, the melodies of the place must be indeed funereal.

But now the sun was shining. The sea had no sombre face, but flung itself panting on the shore with a sort of wild, voluptuous joy. Wave coursed wave, and crest over-topped crest, like children, each endeavoring to out-leap the other. Along the margent of the long curving beach undulated the sea-line, and, afar out, a rim of yellow mist floated around the horizon and clasped the sea in a golden ring.

From the Bard somehow the oriental indolence had disappeared. Doubtless, he sighed for the baths at Damascus, as he flung off his flowing robes and plunged into the surf, that rushed at him with a hollow roar as he entered; and in a few moments more we saw him gliding along the crests of the waves with light and easy strokes. Dimes, poor fellow, was doing battle with the surf. Every moment some ferocious billow would sweep madly towards him, smite his thin legs from under him, and with a faint cry he would disappear from the upper world, to emerge in a second or two with his mouth full of salt water, and his ears booming with the echoes of a thousand oceans. We, half sea-king by descent,

revelled amid the rolling waves, as if they were still our domain, now darting through half-transparent billows, now floating on the heaving combs, that lapped and twined about our limbs with volup

tuous caresses.

Suddenly a voice, chanting solemnly above the waves, reached our ears, and turning, we beheld the Bard. No longer swimming, but, as it were, riding Arionlike through the billows, he sang a sort of broken, but rhythmical chant, while his eyes seemed to pierce the endless sky that stretched away before him. Something like this he hymned.

"Across the wide ocean the scent of palm-groves comes freshly to my nostrils. No envious cliff bars the seas that lie liquidly between me and Afric's golden sands. Twin harmonies are breaking on mine ear, and the music of ocean is mingled with the music of the Nile. O sunny Desert! O dewy Palms! from another hemisphere I send thee greeting and love. But the desert sands arise as I speak, and whirling themselves into a giant cloudy shape, seem like a good genius to beckon me across. And the palm trees bow and wave their leaves with odorous invitation; and sharp and shrill sounds the whinny of my Arab steed. Gallant stallion, thou dost not call in vain! I shall dwell with thee yet beneath the tents of the desert.'

Then Dimes and ourselves saw, to our intense amazement, at the conclusion of this strange hymn, the dusky pipe-bearer bound into the waves after his master, and straightway, what at first seemed to us to be only a gigantic billow, now gradually dilated into a golden caïque, in which twenty Nubians sate at the oars. Then the pipe-bearer, lifting the Bard on his brawny shoulders, placed him in the stern of the caïque, above which fell a canopy of purple silk, and seizing the long steering oar, the rowers bent, and the sea was cleft with the blades of twenty oars. We uttered a cry of dismay as we beheld the boat leap forward, and the Bard, half-turning, waved us a languid adieu; while the pipe-bearer— whom we now perceived, must have been some powerful Arabian enchanter-lifted his long paddle and flung what seemed to be some drops of spray towards us. They fell around us on the beach, and then we perceived them to be pearls of the richest lustre and most magnificent size. When we had picked up the lastfor who could resist such a temptationthe caïque was dim in the distance; but

we heard at intervals the broken song of the rowers, and a light spiral of smoke wound up into the blue heavens. The Bard had taken his pipe with him.

"Dimes," we said, turning mournfully to that undressed individual, "the Bard is off to the desert; we shall never see him more."

Never," said Dimes, with his hands firmly clenched on his treasure-" but he has left us such beautiful pearls! I shall get them made into buttons, and they will go charmingly with my poplin waistcoat."

Ere the reader peruses this, the Bard will doubtless have reached his favorite Damascus. So much for taking him to bathe where the shore faced the East.

So you have met William Chambers, my Dimes. Met that practical and clearheaded brother of that poetic and speculative other brother Robert, who wrote so lovingly about the ballad minstrelsy of his native land, and who is-whisper it very gently, for the rumor interfered sadly with his election for the Rectorship of the University of Glasgow-the author of "Vestiges of Creation." Yes, Chambers was here. Saw us. Took notes of us; and is "printing" them as fast as he can. On the whole, he has given us rather a good character-may his shadow never be less!-and his peregrinations through our land of strange contrasts are less fault-finding and captious than usual. Strange to say, we are not such fast eaters, or such slangular individuals as foregoing travellers would make us out to be; and amongst the the printing offices and publication offices of New York, W. Chambers finds much to admire and something to condemn. Hear him, my Dimes :—

"Unfortunately, with every disposition to admire the vigor displayed by the Harpers in conducting their popular miscellany, one can entertain little respect for a work which systematically adopts articles, often without acknowledgment, from English periodicals. Occupying a much higher literary status, is the monthly magazine, started a year ago by Mr. G. P. Putnam, whose efforts in cultivating native American talent, and in sustaining a work of a purely original character, will, we hope, be crowned with the success which they deserve."

Don't you feel complimented at the above, oh Fifth Avenue Friend! We see your waistcoat swelling to its utmost

expanse, and those fine eyes of yours sparkling with an inner joy; for you are one of the cherished few whose intellect lightens amid the leaves of our monthly issue, and over the sweet thoughts that you jot down so daintily, countless maidens weep, and smile, and wonder, and long for the number in which the portrait of Dimes, author of shall

appear.

Talking of English authors and American pirates, suggests the wholesale attack, in one or two journals, on the character of our great social novelist, Charles Dickens. They say that he has been living dishonorably "fast" that is, beyond his means. That he has sold one of his children to Miss Burdett Coutts-that Miss Kilmansegg of modern history. That he has failed in his later novels, and that his reputation is fading; with a thousand other brutal slanders, disgraceful to the press that printed them, and the lying brains that conjured them into existence.

Professor Felton, "the heartiest of Greek professors," and intimate friend of the author of "Bleak House," in a letter to the Boston Daily Advertiser, gives those mean allegations the "lie direct." His journey to Boulogne is explained as a yearly migration for the benefit of his health, and the children's French accent; and his affairs are shown to be in anything but a bankrupt condition.

We agree with you perfectly, O Dimes. It is loathsome, indeed, to see people not content with robbing a man of his brains, which make his purse, but then proceed to pilfer him of his good name. Here we sell Dickens, in a hundred editions, at every railway station. In brown covers, in yellow covers, in every possible species of cover. We gloat over his "Bleak House;" we devour his "Hard Times." We make fortunes out of this one man's brains, and then, not content with that, we must forge stories in which we endeavor to prove him to be a robber, a swindler, a refugee from his debts, a child-barterer, and what not. If the man is such a villain, why do we accept his money, for re-printing his books is accepting his money? Why do we batten on his brains? Why do we countenance this disreputable creature? O Dimes! Dimes! it is very sickening to see this great writer hawked at by paltry scribblers, who, perhaps wanted somewhere, and at some time, to lick the author's hand, and who were, doubtless, told to go about their business.

LITERATURE.

AMERICAN. It is probably a cool September morning with you, reader, but with us, as we write, the "thenometer" (as they say in certain parts of Long Island) stands at 103 in the shade. The demand for Putnam's Monthly surpasses the power of machinery to supply it, unless it is begun betimes, so that what comes to you in the autumn, has parted from us in the summer, while our autumn will be your winter, &c. We communicate, therefore, under the disadvantages of what Charles Lamb calls an "inconsistent chronology;" our seasons are not your seasons, and what is truth to us now, may be a lie, as the same authority says, by the time it reaches you. You remember

his letter addressed to Baron Field, in New South Wales (afterwards expanded into one of the most amusing essays of Elia), wherein he complains of the distorting effects of distance, humorously exaggerating them into a writing for posterity, and recalling Mrs. Rowe's superscription "Alcander to Strephon, in the Shades."

Do not think us dilatory, then, if we say that we have just finished the reading of Mrs. BEECHER STOWE's Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands. We suppose that by your time, it has been read all over the United States, and that nearly everybody has formed a judgment of its merits. Everybody will be, consequently, better prepared to estimate the force of the brief criticism of it, which we intend to make. Mrs. STOWE'S pilgrimage to the old world, was the most extraordinary in its circumstances that was ever achieved by an American. She was received abroad, in a manner in which no one from this side the Atlantic, not even official and distinguished personages, had been before received. Daniel Webster, who went to England preceded by a reputation as the greatest American Statesinan-Martin Van Buren, who might write Ex-President to his name-Fenimore Cooper, who possessed European fame as a novelist-George Bancroft, the eminent historian and member of a dozen learned foreign societies-Fremont, the rival of the youthful Humboldt-not one of them created as much sensation, either in England or on the Continent, as this simple New England woman-daughter, wife and sister of clergymen-who was only known by

the single book she had written. Franklin, perhaps, in his day, produced as great a stir in the circles of Paris; but since Franklin, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe has carried off the loudest and longest European plaudits. She was not only the guest, but the intimate household friend of the highest aristocracy in Great Britain, such as the Howards, Russels, and Gowers; she was called upon or welcomed by the most eminent statesmen, such as Palmerston, Aberdeen, Cobden, Denman, &c.; she was breakfasted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and feted by Liverpool Quakers and Manchester bankers; she was talked at or written about by the most brilliant authors, such as Macaulay, Milman, Dickens, Thackeray, to say nothing of Alison and Gilfillan; and she was feted by cities, towns and villages without number. Even Royalty itself was only restrained from a public manifestation of its regard by politic motives and not by any want of disposition. Nor were the evidences of a friendly feeling confined to the capitals; for in the remotest districts of Scotland, and away up among the almost uninhabitable snows of the Alps, the authoress of Uncle Tom's Cabin found a ready sympathy and eager tokens of respect.

The book, which records Mrs. Stowe's own account of these ovations may well be called Sunny Memories, for the sunshine of favor and admiration seems to have been showered upon her at every step of her tour. It is true that the demonstrations of the Continent were not as profuse and shining as those of Great Britain, but they were by no means wanting. Mrs. Stowe, all the while, too, deported herself as a most gentle and modest lioness. We cannot discover in her allusions to these honors the least touch of an intoxicated vanity. She bears her accumulated triumphs, and speaks of them with extreme discretion and continence. She is, perhaps, a little anxious to screen her aristocratic English acquaintances from certain blame which has been heaped upon them, but not more so than is natural. Both gratitude and a sense of what is due to the cause she represents, agree in inducing her to speak well of her friends. She does not scruple, however, to bring them before the public, but in that is excusable, as her visit was a kind of public one, and what she says of them is not at