Once there moved upon the stair
Olden love-steps mounting slow,
But the face that met him there
Drove him to the depths below;
For those eyes
Through his soul seemed looking, looking,
All their sad surprise.
From that day the door was nailed
Of that memory-haunted room,
And the portrait hung and paled
In the dead dust and the gloom,--
Save the eyes,
Ever looking, ever looking,
With such sad surprise!
A LEAF
FROM THE AMERICAN MAGAZINE-LITERATURE OF THE LAST CENTURY.
One hundred and sixteen years ago, to wit, on the 20th day of October,
A.D. 1743, the quiet precincts of certain streets in the town of Boston
were the theatre of unusual proceedings. An unwonted activity pervaded
the well-known printing-office of the "Messrs. Rogers and Fowle, in
Prison Lane," now Court Street; a small printed sheet was being worked
off,--not with the frantic rush and roar of one of Hoe's six-cylinder
giants, but with the calm circumspection befitting the lever-press and
ink-balls of that day,--to be conveyed, so soon as it should have
assumed a presentable shape, to the counters of "Samuel Eliot, in
Cornhill" and "Joshua Blanchard, in Dock Square," (and, we will hope,
to the addresses indicated on a long subscription-list,) for the
entertainment and instruction of ladies in high-heeled shoes and hoops,
forerunners of greater things thereafter, and gentlemen in big wigs,
cocked hats, and small-clothes, no more to be encountered in our daily
walks, and known to their degenerate descendants only by the aid of the
art of limner or sculptor.
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