spite of my guards, I believe there could not be fewer than ten thousand at several times who mounted my body by the help of ladders. But a proclamation was soon issued to forbid it upon pain of death. When the workmen found that it was impossible for me to break loose, they cut all the strings that bound me; whereupon I rose up with as melancholy a disposition as ever I had in my life. But the noise and astonishment of the people at seeing me rise and walk are not to be expressed. The chains that held my left leg were about two yards long; and gave me not only the liberty of walking backwards and forwards in a semicircle, but being fixed. within four inches of the gate, allowed me to creep in and lie at my full length in the temple.

THE STRULDBRUGS.

(From "Gulliver's Travels.")

ONE day, in much good company [among the Luggnaggians] I was asked by a person of quality, "whether I had seen any of their struldbrugs, or immortals?" I said, "I had not;" and desired he would explain to me what he meant by such an appellation, applied to a mortal creature. He told me that "sometimes, though very rarely, a child happened to be born in a family, with a red circular spot on the forehead, directly over the left eyebrow, which was an infallible mark that it should never die. The spot," as he described it, "was about the compass of a silver threepence, but in the course of time. grew larger, and changed its color: for at twelve years of age it became green, so continued till five-and-twenty, then turned a deep blue; at five-and-forty it grew coal-black, and as large as an English shilling, but never admitted any further alteration."

After this preface, he gave me a particular account of the struldbrugs among them. He said, "They commonly acted like mortals till about thirty years old; after which by degrees they grew melancholy and dejected, increasing in both till they came to fourscore. This he learned from their own confession; for otherwise, there not being above two or three of that species born in an age, they were too few to form a general observation by. When they came to fourscore years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in this country, they had not only

all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They were not only opinionated, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren. Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passions. But those objects against which their envy seems principally directed are the vices of the younger sort and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the former, they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure; and whenever they see a funeral, they lament and repine that others are gone to a harbor of rest to which they themselves never can hope to arrive. They have no remembrance of anything but what they learned and observed in their youth and middle age, and even that is very imperfect; and for the truth or particulars of any fact, it is safer to depend on common tradition than upon their best recollections. The least miserable among them appear to be those who turn to dotage, and entirely lose their memories: these meet with more pity and assistance because they want many bad qualities which abound in others."

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES, an English poet; born near Henley-on-Thames, April 5, 1837. He was educated partly in France and partly at Eton. In his twentieth year he was entered at Balliol College, Oxford, but left without taking a degree. His principal works are "The Queen Mother" and "Rosamund," dramas (1860); "Atalanta in Calydon," a dramatic poem (1864); "Chastelard," a tragedy (1865); "Poems and Ballads " (1866), withdrawn and republished under the name "Laus Veneris, and Other Poems and Ballads;" "A Song of Italy," and "William Blake" (1867); "Siena," a poem (1868); "Ode on the Proclamation of the French Republic" (1870); "Songs before Sunrise" (1871); "Under the Microscope" (1872); "The Fleshly School;" "Bothwell," a tragedy (1874); "Essays and Studies" (1875); "Poems and Ballads," second series (1878); "A Study of Shakespeare" (1879); "Songs of the Spring-tides" (1880); "Studies in Song" (1881); "Tristram of Lyonesse" (1882); "A Century of Roundels" (1883); "Locrine," a tragedy (1887); "Poems and Ballads," third series (1889); "A Study of Ben Jonson" (1889); "The Sisters," a tragedy (1892); "Astrophel, and Other Poems" (1894); and "Studies in Prose and Poetry" (1894).

CHORUS FROM "ATALANTA IN CALYDON.”

BEFORE the beginning of years

There came to the making of man

Time, with a gift of tears;

Grief, with a glass that ran;

Pleasure, with pain for leaven;
Summer, with flowers that fell;
Remembrance, fallen from heaven;
And madness, risen from hell;
Strength, without hands to smite;
Love that endures for a breath;
Night, the shadow of light;

And Life, the shadow of death.

And the high gods took in hand
Fire, and the falling of tears,
And a measure of sliding sand
From under the feet of the years,
And froth and drift of the sea,
And dust of the laboring earth,
And bodies of things to be,

In the houses of death and of birth;
And wrought with weeping and laughter,
And fashioned with loathing and love,

With life before and after,

And death beneath and above;

For a day and a night and a morrow,

That his strength might endure for a span, With travail and heavy sorrow,

The holy spirit of man.

From the winds of the north and the south

They gathered as unto strife;
They breathed upon his mouth,
They filled his body with life;
Eyesight and speech they wrought
For the veils of the souls therein;
A time for labor and thought,

A time to serve and to sin.

They gave him a light in his ways,
And love, and a space for delight;

And beauty and length of days,

And night, and sleep in the night. His speech is a burning fire,

With his lips he travaileth;

In his heart is a blind desire,

In his eyes foreknowledge of death;
He weaves, and is clothed with derision;
Sows, and he shall not reap;

His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep.

DEDICATION.

1865.

THE sea gives her shells to the shingle,
The earth gives her streams to the sea;

They are many, but my gift is single,
My verses, the first fruits of me.

Let the wind take the green and the gray leaf,
Cast forth without fruit upon air;
Take rose-leaf and vine-leaf and bay-leaf
Blown loose from the hair.

The night shakes them round me in legions,
Dawn drives them before her like dreams;
Time sheds them like snows on strange regions,
Swept shoreward on infinite streams;
Leaves pallid and sombre and ruddy,

Dead fruits of the fugitive years;

Some stained as with wine and made bloody,
And some as with tears.

Some scattered in seven years' traces,

As they fell from the boy that was then; Long left among idle green places,

Or gathered but now among men; On seas full of wonder and peril,

Blown white round the capes of the north; Or in islands where myrtles are sterile And loves bring not forth.

The songs of dead seasons that wander
On wings of articulate words;

Lost leaves that the shore-wind may squander,
Light flocks of untamable birds: