The "Life Preserving Coffin," lately exhibited at the fair of the Institute, it is so constructed as to fly open with the least stir of the occupant, and made as comfortable within as if intended for a temporary lodging. The proprietor recommends (which, indeed, it would be useless without,) a corresponding facility of exit from the vault, and arrangements for privacy, light and fresh air-in short, all that would be agreeable to the revenant on first waking. Not being, myself, a person wholly incapable of changing my mind, I felt, for the first time in my life, some little alarm as to the frequency of trance or suspended animation, and, seeing a coffin-shop near Niblo's, I ventured to call on the proprietor (Mr. D——, a most respectable undertaker) and make a few inquiries. Mr. D. buries from one to three persons a day, averaging from six to eight hundred annually. He has never been called upon to inter the same gentleman twice, in a professional practice of many years. He has seen a great number of coffins re-opened and never a sign|| of the person's having moved, except by sliding in bringing down stairs. I mentioned to him an instance that came to my own knowledge, of a young lady, who was found turned upon her face-disinterred the day after her burial to be shown to a relative. But, even this, he thought, was the result of rude handling of the coffin. Mr. D. seemed incredulous as to any modern instance of burial alive. He had spent much time and money, however, in experiments to keep people dead. He thought that in an exhausted reeeiver, made of an iron cylinder to resist the pressure of the air, the body could be kept unchanged for fifty years, and that, immersed in spirits and enclosed in lead, the face would be recognizable after twenty years. (The process seems both undesirable and contradictory, by the way-for the posthumous drowning of a man makes his death sure, and he is kept in spirits to prevent his vegetating-as he would naturally after decay.)

Incidentally, Mr. D. informed me that a respectable funeral in New-York costs from two hundred to eight hundred dollars, being rather more expensively done in New-York and Boston than in any other city except New Orlerns, (where they say a man may afford to live who cannot afford to die.) || In Philadelphia they make the coffin with a sloping roof, which, he remarked, is inconvenient for packing in vaults, though it seems accommodated to the one epitaph of the Romans-sit illi terra levis. They line their coffins more expensively in Philadelphia than elsewhere-with satin or velvet instead of flannel-and bury the dead in silk stockings and white gloves. We have not yet arrived at the ceremony of hired mourners, as in England, nor of plumes to the hearse and horses.

make flower-gardens of their graveyards, and inscribe upon
the stone at the head of the buried man the "day he came
hither and the day he went home"-his birth-day and time
of death. This is clothing with the proper aspect an event
which is only an unlinking of a chain, no part of which can
decay-the spirit to return to its fountain and the body to
be re-produced in other forms of life-and it is a curious
thing that most Christians represent Death as a frightful skele-
ton, while the Greeks, who had no happiness in their here-
after, painted him as a sleeping child or a beautiful youth.
Death in the East was formerly attributed to the attachment
of a particular deity, who took his favourite to a better world;
to the love of Aurora, if the death happened in the morning;
of Selene, if it happened at night; of the water-nymphs, if
drowned; of Jupiter, if killed by lightning. The caverns
where the martyrs were laid were called "chambers of re-
pose." And this, surely, is the better impression to give of
death to those whose minds are forming. Query-whether
a society for the purpose of embellishing cemeteries and
brightening all the common surroundings of death and burial
would not be worthy the attention of some philanthropic en-
thusiast? The solemnities connected with a future life need
not make the gate to it always so dreadful; and, for one, I
should be content to put the separation of soul and body on
a level with the unlinking of a friendship or a change of
opinion-erecting a cenotaph for either of the three changes,
as the Pythagoreans did to the memory of those who left
their sect. But this is more an essay than an epistle.

A beautiful printed copy of a "Translation of Ten
Cantos of Dante's Inferno" has been sent me.
The trans-
lator is Mr. Parsons, of Boston. It is done with a great deal
of scholarship and labour, and an uncommon fecility of lan-
guage-all of which, expended on an original poem, might,
with his talent, have produced something as good as his
translation, though not as good as Dante's Inferno. It strikes
me that any transfer of a work of genius from one language
to another-professing more than a simple rendering of the
meaning and yet giving a deteriorated copy-is a loss of
time and an injury to the original author. Mr. Parsons has
done his translation in double rhyme, depriving Dante of
the beauty of the terza rima, and at the same time weak.
ening the literalness of the translation by the fetters of
rhyme, and this seems to me ill-advised. There is no me-
dium, I think, between a translation of absolute fidelity and
a refusion and recasting of the subject-matter by a genius
almost equal to the original author; and, after the compara-
tive failure of Byron at this, Mr. Parsons might hesitate. I
hope he will try something of his own.

Mrs. Ellis's" Housekeeping Made Easy" has been Americanized (adapted to the habits of our people, that is to say) by a very distinguished lady of New-York, and it is the COOKERY-BOOK-they say, who know. Burgess & Stringer are selling it by thousands. Like every thing else, almost, our cookery is a compound of French and English practice, taking (as intended by this lady in her book) the excellen

Notwithstanding the incredulity of my friend the undertaker, however, asphyxia, or a suspension of life, with all the appearance of death, is certified to in many instances, and carefully provided for in some countries. In Frankfort, Ger. many, the dead man is laid in a well-aired room and his hand fastened for three days to a bell-pull. The Romans cut off one of the fingers before burning the corpse or other-cies of both. wise bestowing it out of sight. The Egyptians made sure by embalming, and other nations by frequent washing and anointing. Medical books say we should wait at least three days in winter and two in summer, before interring the dead. It has been suggested that there should be a public officer who should carefully examine the body and give a certificate, without which the burial should be illegal.

The embellishment of burial grounds is one of the most beautiful and commendable features of our time and country.

Crawford's Statue of Orpheus is being treated with due honour in Boston-Boston all-praiseworthy for its warmth in fostering the arts! The Athenæum was found to have no room which could show this fine work to advantage, and the committee are now putting up a separate building for its exhibition.

Mr. Gould's new work, "The Sleep-Rider in the Omnibus," is very amusingly written, and is making a stir. The city is depleting somewhat-strangers departing daiThere always seemed to me far too much horror connectedly south and west in large troops. Broadway loses a conwith the common idea of death and burial. The Moravians siderable attraction thereby.

HERE-AND-THERE-ITIES.

Thanks to the increase of our readers, we are now enabled to withdraw our contributions from the magazines, and shall hereafter write for no monthly or weekly except the NEW MIRROR. We have sent our last tale to our liberal friends, Graham and Godey, and have of course a spacious pasture to add to the freehold of the homestead. We have had some praise for our magazine-writing, and we are therefore emboldened to think that the mention of our transfer of this particular talent to the use of the NEW MIRROR only may commend it more to your liking.

A gentleman in New-Jersey has sent us some "Lines on the death of a young lady," and they express very natural feelings; but with neither novelty or force enough to entitle them to print. He should be aware, that while grief is new, the most commonplace expression of it seems forcible to the sufferer. The ear to which

we have long known and often lamented. There was a
good horse-jocky spoiled, in the making a poet of us, and
we took to the swing of an axe like a tadpole to swimming.
But we were not aware that we were appreciated. Some
man, who sees through our poetic visor, writes thus to the
"Ohio Statesman."

"The Rev. Mr. Maffit is in town exhorting sinners to re-
Astor-house for the winter, I suppose. I think Willis would
pentance. N. P. Willis has taken up his quarters at the
do better in the backwoods than at the Astor, for he is a
stout, able-bodied man, and could maul his hundred rails a
day like a knife. I have no notion of these overgrown,
lazy fellows laying around the flash hotels, idling away their
precious time."

First correcting this gentleman's facts and cacology-(as we do not "lay" either eggs or wagers, and are not “overgrown," being six feet high to a hair)-we entirely agree with him as to our original destination. We are a crack chopster, and for several winters have fulfilled our destiny with delight-chopping an avenue through some woods that we thought belonged to us, (which avenue we finished, for somebody else, before we discovered our mistake,) and never so happy as when up to the knees in snow and letting it into the hickories with a woodman's emphasis and discretion! No steam-boiler ever rejoiced in its escape-valve, no hawser in the captain's "let go!" as we have done in swinging our has the gladness in itself, as the wounded heart has in its heart round and banging it into a tree-for the axe was but wound the eloquence of an old monotone of grief. If he is a vicar and a vent! " Woodman, spare that tree!" was the disposed to soothe his sorrow by an exercise of the imagina-bitterest veto ever laid upon our pleasures. tion, however, he should brood upon such pictures as Shelley draws in the Witch of Atlas:

"The pine boughs sing

Old songs with new gladness"

"A friend" wishes us to "do our part" toward putting down the abuses and perversions of criticism. La! man! you can't reform the age! Besides, criticism has killed itself by overdoing the matter. Who judges of a book by a criticism upon it! The best way is to keep overdoing it-to knock down the bull the way he is going, not to keep him on his legs by ineffectual opposition. Nobody is hurt by criticism now-nobody mended. And what Utopia could make it better? Coleridge was over-sensitive on the subject, though he laments the degradation of authors very eloquently. "In times of old," he says, "books were as religious

oracles; as literature advanced, they next become venerable preceptors; they then descended to the rank of instructive friends; and, as their numbers increased, they sunk still lower to that of entertaining companions; and, at present, they seem degraded into culprits, to hold up their hands at the bar of every self-elected judge who chooses to write from humour or interest, enmity or arrogance."

That our leaf

"By some o'er hasty angel was misplaced
In Fate's eternal volume"

But we didn't make money at it. We saved almost three shillings a day,-(as to a "penny saved" being " equal to a penny got," we scorn the improbability!)—and the prin cipal profit was the willingness it gave us to sit still in our chair and scribble. No! we loved our axe with a passion. We feared that it might somehow turn out to be a sinful indulgence, it was so tempting and pleasurable—but alas! we make more with a quill

("would half our wealth Might buy this for a lie!")

and while that is the case, the "correspondent of the Ohio
Statesman" must pity, not blame, our exile from the woods
to the Astor. Set us up-give us a clean deed of Glenmary
and its woods, a horse and saddle and our old axe-and
never boy watched the darkening of his beard with the

delight with which we shall see thicken again the van

ished calluses in our palm! Fie on a life with neither resis-
tance nor antagonism-with close air, pent lungs, arms ach-
ing and muscles manacled and numb! Horses to break and
trees to chop down are Paradise to it-we chance to know—
but our axe is rusty and our quill is busy. Invicem cedunt
dolor et voluptas.

"M. G. L." of Trenton writes us a strong letter, urging
the republication in the Mirror, of the "Letters from under
a Bridge." He is at least the twentieth subscriber who
has taken the trouble to write to us with the same request.
But we cannot do it. We will do another thing, however-
publish them (with the additional letters, since written) in
an Extra of the New Mirror. The American edition is
out of print, and the superb quarto edition, published in
London (and embellished with steel engravings at an ex-
pense of several thousand dollars) is no longer to be found.
We cannot publish an edition that would pay us, in the
present state of the copyright law, but we can, perhaps,
clear our expenses and supply our readers, by means of an
Extra. If possible we will procure, for its embellishment,
the exquisite view of Glenmary which forms the vignette to
the London edition.

being of some service to me, in gratitude for the assistance I have given you. Now is the time to do it. My young friend is ill. Take him as a boarder until he gets well. Here is a purse, in which you will find wherewith to make the acquisition of the indispensable articles to lodge your new guest."

misery he suffered, and he soon fell back into despondency. || woman about forty, "you have often expressed the wish of Notwithstanding his age, for he numbered not less than sixty-five years, the old man soon reached the Place Notre Dame, entered successively several houses, went into the garrets of three or four poor lodgings, visited families where there was the sick, and consoled, with kind and gentle words, all who were afflicted. To the suffering he gave the prospect of a speedy cure; to those who attended them, encouragement, and praises for their perseverance and good

"We would give up our own bed sooner than lodge badly any one brought here by you," interrupted the artisan; and