an intensity of compassion, closed her eyelids; for death had come over them. In my horror, my fright and dastardly cowardice I should rather call it, I failed to prevent or check her.

Aspasia has then her equal on the earth!

Aspasia is all that women in their wildest wishes can desire to be; Cleone, all that the Immortals are. But she has friendship, she has sympathy: have those?

She has, did I say? And can nothing then bring me back my recollection? not even she! I want it not: those moments are present yet, and will never pass away.

She asked for you.

"

Aspasia," answered I, "is absent."

"Not with her husband! not with her husband!" cried she.

"Pericles," I replied, "is gone to the Blessed." "She was with him then, while hope remained for her! I knew she would be. Tell me she was."

And saying it, she grasped my arm, and looked earnestly in my face. Suddenly, as it appeared to me, she blushed slightly: on her countenance there was, momentarily, somewhat less of its paleness. She walked into the aviary: the lattice stood open the birds were not flown, but dead. She drew back; she hesitated; she departed. I followed her for now, and not earlier, I bethought me it was Cleone. Before I came up to her, she had asked a question of an elderly man, who opened his lips but could not answer her, and whose arm, raised with difficulty from the pave

ment, when it would have directed her to the object of her inquiry, dropped upon his breast. A boy was with him, gazing in wonder at the elegance and composure of her attire, such as, in these years of calamity and of indifference to seemliness, can nowhere be found in Athens. He roused himself from his listless posture, beckoned, and walked before us: Reaching the garden of Epimedea, we entered it through the house; silent, vacant, the doors broken down. Sure sign that some family, perhaps many, had, but few days since, utterly died off within its chambers. For nearly all the habitations, in all quarters of the city, are crowded with emigrants from the burghs of Attica. The pestilence is now the least appalling where it has made the most havoc. But how hideous, how disheartening, is the sudden stride before our eyes, from health and beauty to deformity and death! In this waste and desolation there was more peacefulness, I believe, than anywhere else beyond, in the whole extent of our dominions. It was not to last.

A tomb stood opposite the entrance: Cleone rushed toward it, reposed her brow against it, and said at intervals,

"I am weary: I ache throughout: I thirst bitterly I cannot read the epitaph."

The boy advanced, drew his finger slowly along, at the bottom of the letters, and said,

"" Surely they are plain enough..

"Xeniades son of Charondas."

He turned round and looked at me, well satisfied. Cleone lowered her cheek to the inscription;

but her knees bent under her, and she was fain to be seated on the basement.

"Cleone!" said I,.. she started at the name.. "Come, I beseech you, from that sepulchre."

"The reproof is just," she replied.. "Here, too, even here, I am an alien!"

Aspasia! she will gladden your memory no more never more will she heave your bosom with fond expectancy. There is none to whom, in the pride of your soul, you will run with her letters in your hand. He, upon whose shoulder you have read them in my presence, lies also in the grave: the last of them is written.

REFLECTIONS ON ATHENS

AT THE DECEASE OF PERICLES.1

F

OR many years, and indeed for many ages, it has been the fashion to condemn the government of Athens,

and every one at all similar in its principles and these censures are passed and transmitted, by gentlemen who never perused a single author of that country, aad are utterly ignorant of its polity. Among the objections urged against it, is this; that it was liable to turbulence and subversion.

First for turbulence; and few words will do. Ebullitions are often the preventatives of eruptions, rebellions, and revolutions. At schools there is more turbulence in a holiday than in a whipping-day. Which would the gentlemen

prefer?

Now to subversion. A mausoleum and a pyramid are less liable to be overthrown than a hospital and an alms-house: are they usefuller? [1 Not reprinted in the 2nd ed.]

But we find by one glance at the history of Athens, that few governments have been so durable. She flourished for nearly a millennium ; interrupted, it is true, by the supremacy of Pisistratus, the struggle of his successor, the Spartan imposition of the thirty Oligarchs, the intrusive satrapy of the Persianized Macedonian, and the bloody grasp of Sulla; altogether a segment of a century. She was no less happy, no less liberal in her institutions, when, forty years after this champion of aristocracy, she became the residence of Titus Pomponius; nor later, when she found herself the cherished home of another who deserved like him the appellation of Atticus, the elegant and generous Herodes. The Romans neither in the republick nor under the emperors deprived her of her municipal privileges, nor meddled materially with her ancient forms. She stood, in all her strength and beauty, against the whirlwind of Macedon that swept away the wealth of Asia, and against the malaria of Rome that prostrated the liberties of Europe; and she fell when the world had fallen. Athens was not ruined by the violence of the citizens, nor by the improvidence of the rulers, but by the most intractable malady that ever befell mankind. Nor indeed was she then so ruined but that she rose again in full splendour a few years afterward, and displayed before Greece all the pageantry of intellect in a Socrates and a Plato; all its solider glory in an Aristoteles, a Demosthenes, and a Phocion. It was Athens who not only defeated and dispersed the naval and