next day a great black Cloud
Hung over the land from coast to coast;
And the next, the Knocking was "pretty loud,"--
With a sudden Eclipse, as it were, of the sun,--
And the earth, all day, quaked--"Donelson!"
But the next was the deadliest day of all,
And the Master's Mate was not at Call!
Yet nobody seemed to wonder why,--
There was something, perhaps, the Master knew
Far better than we, for his Mate to do,--
And the Day went down with a bloody sky!

But when the long, long Night was past,
And our Eagle, sweeping the traitor's crag,
Circled to victory up the dome,
The great Reveille was heard at last!--
They wrapped the Mate in his country's flag,
And sent him in glory home!

THE VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE IN LIBRARIES.

A visible library is a goodly sight. We do not underrate the external
value of books, when we say it is the invisible which forms their chief
charm. Sometimes rather too much is said about "tall copies," and
"large-paper copies," and "first editions," the binding, paper, type,
and all the rest of the outside attraction, or the fancy price, which go
to make up the collector's trade. The books themselves feel a little
degraded, when this sort of conversation is carried on in their
presence: some of them know well enough that occasionally they fall into
hands which think more "of the coat than of the man who is under it." We
must, however, be honest enough to confess that we are ourself a
bibliomaniac, and few possessions are more valued than an old
manuscript, written on vellum some five hundred years ago, of which we
cannot read one word. Nor do we prize less the modern extreme of
external attraction,--volumes exquisitely printed and adorned, bound by
Riviere, in full tree-marbled calf, with delicate tooling on the back,
which looks as if the frost-work from the window-pane on a cold January
morning had been transmuted into gold, and laid on the leather. Ah,
these are sights fit for the gods!

Nevertheless, we come back to our starting-point, that what is unseen
forms the real value of the library. The type, the paper, the binding,
the age, are all visible; but the soul that conceived it, the mind that
arranged it, the hand that wrote it, the associations which cling to it,
are the invisible links in a long chain of thought, effort, and history,
which make the book what it is.

In wandering through the great libraries of Europ