The Huma.*-LOUISA P. SMITH.

FLY on, nor touch thy wing, bright bird,
Too near our shaded earth,

Or the warbling, now so sweetly heard,
May lose its note of mirth.

Fly on, nor seek a place of rest

In the home of "care-worn things:"
"Twould dim the light of thy shining crest,
And thy brightly burnished wings,
To dip them where the waters glide
That flow from a troubled earthly tide.

The fields of upper air are thine,
Thy place where stars shine free;
I would thy home, bright one, were mine,
Above life's stormy sea.

I would never wander, bird, like thee,

So near this place again;

With wing and spirit once light and free,

They should wear no more the chain

With which they are bound and fettered here,

For ever struggling for skies more clear.

There are many things like thee, bright bird;
Hopes as thy plumage gay;

Our air is with them for ever stirred,

But still in air they stay.

And Happiness, like thee, fair one,
Is ever hovering o'er,

But rests in a land of brighter sun,

On a waveless, peaceful shore,

And stoops to lave her weary wings,

Where the fount of "living waters" springs.

The Paint King.-WASHINGTON ALLSTON.

FAIR Ellen was long the delight of the young;
No damsel could with her compare;

"A bird peculiar to the East. It is supposed to fly constantly in tho air, and never touch the ground."

Her charms were the theme of the heart and the tongue, And bards without number, in ecstasies, sung

The beauties of Ellen the fair.

Yet cold was the maid; and, though legions advanced,
All drilled by Ovidean art,

And languished and ogled, protested and danced,
Like shadows they came, and like shadows they glanced
From the hard, polished ice of her heart.

Yet still did the heart of fair Ellen implore
A something that could not be found;

Like a sailor she seemed on a desolate, shore,
With nor house, nor a tree, nor a sound but the roar
Of breakers high dashing around.

From object to object still, still would she veer,
Though nothing, alas! could she find;

Like the moon, without atmosphere, brilliant and clear,
Yet doomed, like the moon, with no being to cheer
The bright barren waste of her mind.

But, rather than sit like a statue so still,

When the rain made her mansion a pound,
Up and down would she go, like the sails of a mill,
And pat every stair, like a woodpecker's bill,
From the tiles of the roof to the ground.

One morn, as the maid from her casement inclined,
Passed a youth with a frame in his hand.
The casement she closed, not the eye of her mind,
For, do all she could, no, she could not be blind;
Still before her she saw the youth stand.

"Ah, what can he do"-said the languishing maid,
"Ah, what with that frame can he do?""

And she knelt to the goddess of secrets, and prayed, When the youth passed again, and again he displayed The frame and a picture to view.

"Oh, beautiful picture!" the fair Ellen cried,
"I must see thee again, or I die."

Then under her white chin her bonnet she tied,
And after the youth and the picture she hied,

When the youth, looking back, met her eye.

"Fair damsel," said he, (and he chuckled the while,)
"This picture, I see, you admire:

Then take it, I pray you; perhaps 'twill beguile
Some moments of sorrow, (nay, pardon my smile,)
Or, at least, keep you home by the fire."

Then Ellen the gift, with delight and surprise,

From the cunning young stripling received. Rut she knew not the poison that entered her eyes, When, sparkling with rapture, they gazed on her prize— Thus, alas, are fair maidens deceived!

'Twas a youth-o'er the form of a statue inclined,
And the sculptor he seemed of the stone;
Yet he languished as though for its beauty he pined,
And gazed as the eyes of the statue so blind
Reflected the beams of his own.

'Twas the tale of the sculptor Pygmalion of old Fair Ellen remembered, and sighed :

"Ah, couldst thou but lift from that marble, so cold,
Thine eyes too imploring, thy arms should enfold,
And press me this day as thy bride."

She said when, behold, from the canvas arose
The youth, and he stepped from the frame:
With a furious transport his arms did enclose
The love-plighted Ellen; and, clasping, he froze
The blood of the maid with his flame.

She turned, and beheld on each shoulder a wing.
"O heaven! cried she, who art thou?"
From the roof to the ground did his fierce answer ring,
As, frowning, he thundered, "I am the Paint-King!
And mine, lovely maid, thou art now!"

Then high from the ground did the grim monster lift
The loud-screaming maid like a blast;

And he sped through the air like a meteor swift,
While the clouds, wand'ring by him, did fearfully drift
To the right and the left as he passed.

Now suddenly sloping his hurricane flight,
With an eddying whirl he descends;
The air all below him becomes black as night,

And the ground where he treads, as if moved with affright, Like the surge of the Caspian bends.

"I am here!" said the fiend, and he thundering knocked At the gates of a mountainous cave;

The gates open flew, as by magic unlocked,

While the peaks of the mount, reeling to and fro, rocked
Like an island of ice on the wave.

"O, mercy!" cried Ellen, and swooned in his arms; But the Paint-King, he scoffed at her pain.

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Prithee, love," said the monster," what mean these alarms ?" She hears not, she sees not the terrible charms,

That work her to horror again.

She opens her lids, but no longer her eyes
Behold the fair youth she would woo;
Now appears the Paint-King in his natural guise;
His face, like a palette of villanous dies,

Black and white, red and yellow, and blue.

On the skull of a Titan, that Heaven defied,
Sat the fiend, like the grim giant Gog,
While aloft to his mouth a huge pipe he applied,
Twice as big as the Eddystone lighthouse, descried
As it looms through an easterly fog.

And anon, as he puffed the vast volumes, were seen,
In horrid festoons on the wall,

Legs and arms, heads and bodies emerging between,
Like the drawing-room grim of the Scotch Sawney Beane,
By the devil dressed out for a ball.

"Ah me!" cried the damsel, and fell at his feet.
"Must I hang on these walls to be dried?"

"O, no," said the fiend, while he sprung from his seat,
"A far nobler fortune thy person shall meet;
Into paint will I grind thee, my bride!"

Then seizing the maid by her dark auburn hair,
An oil jug he plunged her within.

Seven days, seven nights, with the shrieks of despair,
Did Ellen in torment convulse the dun air,

All covered with oil to the chin.

On the morn of the eighth, on a huge sable stone
Then Ellen, all reeking, he laid;

With a rock for his muller, he crushed every bone,
But, though ground to jelly, still, still did she groan;
For life had forsook not the maid.

Now reaching his palette, with masterly care
Each tint on its surface he spread;

The blue of her eyes, and the brown of her hair,
And the pearl and the white of her forehead so fair,
And her lips' and her checks' rosy red.

Then, stamping his foot, did the monster exclaim,
"Now I brave, cruel fairy, thy scorn!"
When, lo! from a chasm wide-yawning there came
A light tiny chariot of rose-colored flame,

By a team of ten glow-worms upborne.

Enthroned in the midst on an emerald bright,
Fair Geraldine sat without peer;

Her robe was a gleam of the first blush of light,
And her mantle the fleece of a noon-cloud white,
And a beam of the moon was her spear.

In an accent that stole on the still charmed air
Like the first gentle language of Eve,
Thus spake from her chariot the fairy so fair:
"I come at thy call, but, O Paint-King, beware,
Beware if again you deceive."

""Tis true," said the monster, "thou queen of my heart, Thy portrait I oft have essayed;

Yet ne'er to the canvas could I with my art
The least of thy wonderful beauties impart ;
And my failure with scorn you repaid.

"Now I swear by the light of the Comet-King's tail,❞— And he towered with pride as he spoke,

"If again with these magical colors I fail, The crater of Etna shall hence be my jail,

And my food shall be sulphur and smoke.

"But if I succeed, then, O fair Geraldine,
Thy promise with justice I claim,
And thou, queen of fairies, shalt ever be mine,