ntly depicted for us, in scenes which the memory can never lose,
the mad attempts of the House of Stuart to Romanize England, to the
loss of the most magnificent dominion the world ever saw; and another
historian, scarcely less eloquent, has drawn a series of fearfully
interesting pictures of the stern efforts of the Spaniards to impose
a detested State and a more detested Church upon the burghers of the
Netherlands. The spirit of James II., and the spirit of Philip II., was
the same spirit which is now striving to force Slavery and Slave Law
upon Kansas; and though the field of battle is narrower, and the scene
less conspicuous, the consequences of the struggle are hardly of less
moment. Kansas is the future seat of empire; she will yet give tone and
law to the entire West; and they who are fighting there, in behalf of
humanity and justice, do not fight for themselves alone, but for a large
posterity.

* * * * *

SONNET.

The brave old Poets sing of nobler themes
Than the weak griefs which haunt men's coward souls.
The torrent of their lusty music rolls
Not through dark valleys of distempered dreams,
But murmurous pastures lit by sunny streams;
Or, rushing from some mountain height of Thought,
Swells to strange music, that our minds have sought
Vainly to gather from the doubtful gleams
Of our more gross perceptions. Oh, their strains
Nerve and ennoble Manhood!--no shrill cry,
Set to a treble, tells of querulous woe;
Yet numbers deep-voiced as the mighty Main's
Merge in the ringdove's plaining, or the sigh
Of lovers whispering where sweet streamlets flow.

ART.

THE BRITISH GALLERY IN NEW YORK.

To speak of English Art was, ten years ago, to speak of something
formless, chaotic, indeed, so far as any order or organization of
principles was concerned,--a mass of individual results, felt out,
often, under the most glorious artistic inspiration, but much oftener
the expression of merely ignorant whim, or still more empty academic
knowledge,--a waste of uncultivated, unpruned brushwood, with here and
there a solitary tree towering into unapproachable and inexplicable
symmetry and beauty. Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Turner are great names
in Art-history; but to deduce their development from the English culture
of Art, one must use the same processes as in proving Cromwell to have
been called up by the loyalty of Englishmen. They towered the high