a spirit calm, composed,
Still as a river at the full of tide;
And in his eye there gathered deeper blue,
And beamed a warmer summer. And when sprang
The angry blood, at sloth, or fraud, or wrong,
Something of Bertha touched him into peace
And swayed his voice. Among the people went
Queen Bertha, breathing gracious charities,
And saw but smiling faces; for the light
Aye looks on brightened colors. Like the dawn
(Beloved of all the happy, often sought
In the slow east by hollow eyes that watch)
She seemed to husked find clownish gratitude,
That could but kneel and thank. Of industry
She was the fair exemplar, us she span
Among her maids; and every day she broke
Bread to the needy stranger at her gate.
All sloth and rudeness fled at her approach;
The women blushed and courtesied as she passed,
Preserving word and smile like precious gold;
And where on pillows clustered children's heads,
A shape of light she floated through their dreams."

_History, Theory, and Practice of the Electric Telegraph_. By GEORGE B.
PRESCOTT, Superintendent of Electric Telegraph Lines. Boston: Ticknor
and Fields. 1861. 12mo.

It may be safely said that no one of the wonder-working agencies of the
nineteenth century, of an importance in any degree equal to that of the
Electric Telegraph, is so little understood in its practical details by
the world at large. Its results come before us daily, to satisfy
our morning and evening appetite for news; but how few have a clear
knowledge of even the simplest rules which govern its operation, to say
nothing of the vast and complicated system by which these results are
made so universal! The general intelligence, at present, doubtless
outruns the dull apprehension of the typical Hibernian, who, in earlier
telegraphic times, wasted the better part of a day in watching for the
passage of a veritable letter over the wires; but even now,--after
twenty years of Electric Telegraphy, during which the progress of the
magic wire has been so rapid that it has already reached an extent of
nearly sixty thousand miles in the United States alone,--even now the
ideas of men in general as to the _modus operandi_ of this great
agency are, to say the least, extremely vague. Even the chronic and
pamphlet-producing quarrel between the managers of our telegraphic
system and their Briarean antagonist, the daily-newspaper-press, fails
to convey to our general sense anything beyo