eed--

"From vases in the hall
_Flowers of all heavens, and lovelier than their names_,
Grew side by side."

Persons conversant with the botanical names of flowers will hardly be
able to realize (as the Yankees have it) the idea of their loveliness;
the loveliness of Hippuris, Dolichos, Syngenesia, Cheiranthus,
Artocarpus, Arum dracunculus, Ampelopsis hederaca, Hexandria, Monogynea,
and the rest.

A good description of the demi-scientific sports of the Institute
follows; but the house company and inmates retire to a ruined abbey:--

"High-arch'd and ivy-claspt,
Of finest Gothic, lighter than a fire."

This is a curious jumble in company, two lights of altogether a
different nature; but the party get into a rattling conversation, in
which the noisy babble of the College Cubs is satirically characterized:
we

"Told
Of college: he had climb'd across the spikes,
And he had squeez'd himself betwixt the bars,
And he had breathed the Proctor's dogs; and one
Discuss'd his tutor, rough to common men
But honeying at the whisper of a lord;
And one the Master, as a rogue in grain
Veneer'd with sanctimonious theory."

The dialogue happily takes a turn, and the task of writing the
_Princess_ is assigned to the author, as one of the tales in the
Decameron of Boccaccio. A neighbouring princess of the south (so the
story runs as the prince tells it) is in childhood betrothed to a like
childish prince of the north:--

"She to me
Was proxy-wedded with a _bootless calf_ [?]
At eight years old."

Both grew up, the prince, all imaginative, filling his mind with
pictures of her perfections; but she turning a female reformer of the
Wolstencroft [_sic_] school, resolved never to wed till woman was raised
to an equality with men, and establishing a strange female colony and
college to carry this vast design into effect. In consequence of this
her father is obliged to violate the contract, and his indignant father
prepares for war to enforce it. The prince, with two companions, flies
to the south, to try what he can do for himself; and in the disguise of
ladies they obtain admission to the guarded precincts of the new
Amazonian league. He, meanwhile, sings sweetly of his mistress--

"And still I wore her picture by my heart,
And one dark tress; and all around them both
Swee