ties are scattered about upon the banks or on the piazza, watching the sails and sipping cobblers. The descent to the Lake is very steep, and the smooth water is dotted with a few boats gliding under the low, monotonous banks. The afternoon is tranquil, the light is tender, the air is soft, and the lapping of the water upon the pebbly shore is haply not so musical as words spoken upon its surface.

In the sunset we bowl back again to the hotel. I saw most autumnal sunsets at Saratoga, cold and gorgeous, like the splendor of October woods. They were still and solemn over the purple hills of the horizon, and their light looked strangely in at the windows of the hotel. Many a belle, just arrived from the drive and about to consider the evening"

dressing, paused a moment at the window, stood resplendent in that dying light, and a shade of melan choly touched her lithe fancies, as a cloud dims the waving of golden grain. Who had stood there to dress for a Saratoga ball years ago? Who should stand there, dressing, years to come? This Saratoga, dreamed of, wondered at, longed for-where to be a belle was the flower of human felicity-whose walks, drives, hops, moonlight talks and mornings should be the supreme satisfaction-had it fulfilled its promise?

This moment not Waller should speak to her but Wordsworth, with pensive music:

Look at the fate of summer flowers,

Which blow at daybreak, droop ere even-song:
And, grieved for their brief date, confess that ours
Measured by what we are and ought to be,
Measured by all that, trembling, we foresee,
Is not so long!

If human life do pass away,

Perishing, yet more swiftly than the flower,
Whose frail existence is but of a day:

What space hath Virgin's beauty to disclose
Her sweets, and triumph o'er the breathing rose,
Not even an hour!

The deepest grove whose foliage hid
The happiest lovers Arcady might boast,
Could not the entrance of this thought forbid:
O be thou wise as they, soul-gifted maid!
Nor rate too high what must so quickly fade,
So soon be lost!

Then shall Love teach some virtuous youth
"To draw out of the object of his eyes"
The whilst on thee they gaze in simple truth,
Hues more exalted, a refined form,"

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That dreads not age, nor suffers from the worm,

And never dies!

-She comes at last. The sun has set, and with it those weird fancies, those vague thoughts that streamed shapelessly through her mind like these long, sad vapors through the twilight sky. Nor, for that moment, is the belle less gay, though more beautiful, nor is Saratoga less charming.

Music flows towards us from the ball-room in languid, luxurious measures, like warm, voluptuous arms wreathing around us and drawing us to the dance. When we enter the hall we find very few people, but at the lower end a sprinkling of New Yorklings are in their heaven.

Dancing is natural and lovely as singing. The court of youth and beauty-with the presence of brilliantly dressed women, and an air smoothed and softened with delicate and penetrating perfumes, and the dazzling splendor of lights, is a song unsung, a flower not blossomed, until you mingle in movement with the strain-until the scene is so measured by the music that they become one. This has been said so finely by De Quincey that I cannot refrain from enriching my pages with the quotation:

"And in itself, of all the scenes which this world offers, none is to me so profoundly interesting, none (I say deliberately) so affecting, as the spectacle of men and women floating through the mazes of a dance; under these conditions, however, that the music shall be rich and festal, the execution of the dancers perfect, and the dance itself of a character to admit of free, fluent and continuous motion. *** And wherever the music happens to be not of a light, trivial character, but charged with the spirit of festal pleasure, and the performers in the dance so far skilful as to betray no awkwardness verging on the ludicrous, I believe that many persons feel as I feel in such circumstances, viz.: derive from the spectacle the very grandest form of passionate sadness which can belong to any spectacle whatsoever. From all which the reader may comprehend, if he should not happen experimentally to have felt, that a spectacle of young men and women flowing through the mazes of an intricate dance, under a full volume of music, taken with all the circumstantial adjuncts of such a scene in rich men's halls, the blaze of lights and jewels, the life, the motion, the sea-like undulation of heads, the interweaving of the figures, the anakuklosis, or self-revolving, both of the dance and the music; never ending, still beginning, and the continual regeneration of order from a system of motions

* *

*

which seem forever to approach the very brink of confusion; that such a spectacle, with such circumstances, may happen to be capable of exciting and sustaining the very grandest emotions of philosophic melancholy to which the human spirit is open. Tie reason is in part that such a scene presents a sort of masque of human life, with its whole equipage of pomps and glories, its luxuries of sight and sound, its hours of golden youth, and the interminable revolution of ages hurrying after ages, and one generation treading over the flying footsteps of another, whilst all the while the overruling music attempers the mind to the spectacle,--the subject (as a German would say) to the object, the beholder to the vision. And although this is known to be but one phase of life of life culminating and in ascent-yet the other and repulsive phasis is concealed upon the hidden or averted side of the golden arras, known but not felt or is seen but dimly in the rear, crowding into indistinct proportions. The effect of the music is to place the mind in a state of electiveattraction for every thing in harmony with its own prevailing key."

I do not know how far others will acknowledge the justice of this brilliant passage, but to me it gave a thrill of satisfaction when I read it, as the expression of what is often felt in such circumstances. The secret