suggest that it shall open with Lucy Larcom's "Poor Lone Hannah," the
most touching and tearful of the songs of New-England life,--followed by
Christie Johnstone's night at sea among the blue-lights and the nets
with their silver and lightning mixed, where the fishers struggle with
that immense sheet varnished in red-hot silver,--and at the end let not
the "Pilot's Pretty Daughter" of William Allingham's be forgotten:--

"Were it my lot--there peeped a wish--
To hand a pilot's oar and sail,
Or haul the dripping moonlit mesh
Spangled with herring-scale:
By dying stars how sweet 'twould be,
And dawn-blow freshening the sea,
With weary, cheery pull to shore
To gain my cottage-home once more,
And meet, before I reached the door,
My pretty pilot's daughter!"

But it is a fine fashion of this noble world never to acknowledge itself
too well pleased. Men are ashamed of satisfaction. So soon as they have
exhausted the honey, they condemn the comb; it will do to wax an old
wife's thread;--they forget that the cells whose sides break the usual
uniformity contain the royal embryos. Humdrum read these little novels
through and through, laughed and cried over them in secret, then pulled
a long face, stepped forth and denounced--the typography. Now we admit
that the page presents a fairer appearance with single punctuations,
unblurred by Italics, and its smooth surface unbroken by strings of
capitals;--but let us ask these criticasters for what purpose types were
cast at all. To assist the author in the expression of his ideas, and to
elucidate subtile shades of meaning? or to prove his let and hindrance,