tment here, will excuse them hereafter. _To work hard, live hard,
die hard, and go to hell after all_, would be hard indeed.

Yet a sailor's life is at best but a mixture of a little good with much
evil, and a little pleasure with much pain. The beautiful is linked with
the revolting, the sublime with the common-place, and the solemn with
the ludicrous.

We had hardly returned on board with our sad report, before an auction
was held of the poor man's clothes. The captain had first, however,
called all hands aft, and asked them if they were satisfied that
everything had been done to save the man, and if they thought there was
any use in remaining there longer. The crew all said that it was in
vain, for the man did not know how to swim, and was very heavily
dressed. So we then filled away and kept her off to her course.

* * * * *

=_Evert A. Duyckinck, 1816--._= (Manual, p. 502.)

Essay from "Arcturus."

=_229._= NEWSPAPERS.

No one, it has been said, ever takes up a newspaper without interest, or
lays it down without regret. There is a deeper truth in this observation
than at first thought strikes the mind; it is not the casual
disappointment at the loss of fine writing, or the absence of particular
topics of news, or the variety of subjects that dispel all deep-settled
reflection; but a newspaper is in some measure a picture of human life,
and we can no more read its various paragraphs with pleasure, than
we can look back upon the events of any single day with, unmingled
satisfaction.... A man may learn, sitting by his fireside, more than
an angel would desire to know of human life, by reading well a single
newspaper. It is an instrument of many tones, running through the whole
scale of humanity; from the lightest gayety to the gravest sadness; from
the large interests of nations to the humblest affairs of the smallest
individual. On its single page we read of Births, Marriages, and Deaths;
the daily, almost hourly, register of royalty, how it eat, walked, and
laughed; and the single incident the world deems worth recording of the
life of poverty--how it died. It is a picture of motley human life;
a poet's thought, or an orator's eloquence in one column, and the
condemnation of a pickpocket in another....

Doubtless it was a very satisfactory thing for a Roman poet, when the
wind was quiet, to get an audience about him, under a portico, and
unwind his well-written scroll for an