Locked in its dim and clustering cells!
The lightning gleams of power it sheds
Along its hollow glassy threads!

O Father! grant thy love divine
To make these mystic temples thine!
When wasting age and wearying strife
Have sapped the leaning walls of life,
When darkness gathers over all,
And the last tottering pillars fall,
Take the poor dust thy mercy warms
And mould it into heavenly forms!

* * * * *

LITERARY NOTICES.

_Library of Old Authors.--Works of John Marston_. London: John Russell
Smith. 1856-7.

Mr. Halliwell, at the close of his Preface to the Works of Marston,
(Vol. I. p. xxii.,) says, "The dramas now collected together are
reprinted absolutely from the early editions, which were placed in the
hands of our printers, who thus had the advantage of following them
without the intervention of a transcriber. They are given as nearly as
possible in their original state, the only modernizations attempted
consisting in the alternations of the letters _i_ and _j_, and _u_ and
_v_, the retention of which" (does Mr. Halliwell mean the letters or the
"alternations"?) "would have answered no useful purpose, while it would
have unnecessarily perplexed the modern reader."

This not very clear; but as Mr. Halliwell is a member of several learned
foreign societies, and especially of the Royal _Irish_ Academy, perhaps
it would he unfair to demand that he should write clear English. As one
of Mr. Smith's editors, it was to be expected that he should not write
it idiomatically. Some malign constellation (Taurus, perhaps, whose
infaust aspect may be supposed to preside over the makers of bulls and
blunders) seems to have been in conjunction with heavy Saturn when the
Library was projected. At the top of the same page from which we have
made our quotation, Mr. Halliwell speaks of "conveying a favorable
impression _on_ modern readers." It was surely to no such phrase as this
that Ensign Pistol alluded when he said, "_Convey_ the _wise_ it call."

A literal reprint of an old author may be of value in two ways: the
orthography may in certain cases indicate the ancient pronunciation, or
it may put us on a scent which shall lead us to the burrow of a word
among the roots of language. But in order to this, it surely is not
needful to undertake the reproduction of all the original errors of the
press; and even were it so, the proofs of carelessness in the editorial
de