his horse two miles farther to be shod than live within the convenience of "sociable neighbours." A resident in a city, by the way (and it is a point which should be kept in mind by the retiring metropolitan) has, properly speaking, no neighbours. He has friends, chosen or made by similarity of pursuit, congeniality of taste, or accident, which might have been left unimproved. His literal neighbours he knows by name-if they keep a brass plate, but they are contented to know as little of him, and the acquaintance ends, without offence, in the perusal of the name and number on the door. In the city you pick your friends. In the country, you "take them in the lump."

sers, oftenest, that have seen service as tights, and show a fresher dye in the seams, a hat, price twenty-five cents, (by the dozen,) and shoes of a remediless capriciousness of outline.

I acknowledge that such a costume is a liberty with day. light, which should only be taken within one's own fence, and that it is a misfortune to be surprised in it by a stranger, even there. But I wish to impress upon those to whom this letter is addressed, the obligations of country neighbourhood as to dress and table, and the expediency of securing the degree of liberty which may be desired, by a barrier of distance. Sociable country neighbours, as I said before, are a luxury, but they are certainly an expensive one. Judging by data within my reach, I should say that a man who could live for fifteen hundred dollars a year, within a mile of a sociable village, could have the same personal comforts at ten miles distance for half the money. He numbers, say fifteen families, in his acquaintance, and of course pays at the rate of fifty dollars a family for their gratification. Now it is a question whether you would not rather have the money in board fence or Berkshire hogs. You may like society, and yet not like it at such a high price. Or, (but this would lead me to another subject) you may prefer society in a lump; and with a house full of friends in the months of June and July, live in contemplative and economical solitude the remainder of the year. And this latter plan I take the liberty to recommend more particularly to students and authors.

True, country neighbours are almost always desirable acquaintances simple in their habits, and pure in their morals and conversation. But this letter is addressed to men retiring from the world, who look forward to the undisturbed enjoyment of trees and fields, who expect life to be filled up with the enjoyment of dew at morn, shade at noon, and the || glory of sunset and starlight, and who consider the complete repose of the articulating organs, and release from oppressive and unmeaning social observances, as the fruition of Paradise. To men who have experience or philosophy enough to have reduced life to this, I should recommend a distance of five miles from any village or any family with grown-up daughters. In my character of Dollar, I may be forgiven for remarking, also, that this degree of seclusion doubles an income (by enabling a man to live on half of it,)|| and so, freeing the mind from the care of pelf, removes the very gravest of the obstacles to happiness. I refer to no sav- Touching "grounds." The first impulses of taste are ing which infringes on comfort. The housekeeper who dangerous to follow, no less from their blindness to unforecaters for her own family in an unvisited seclusion, and the seen combinations, than from their expensiveness. In plachousekeeper who provides for her family with an eye to the ing your house as far from the public road as possible, possible or probable interruption of acquaintances not friends,|| (and a considerable distance from dust and intrusion, seems live at very different rates; and the latter adds one dish to at first a sine qua non) you entail upon yourself a very costly the bounty of the table, perhaps, but two to its vanity. Still appendage in the shape of a private road, which of course more in the comfort and expensiveness of dress. The natu- must be nicely gravelled and nicely kept. A walk or ral and most blissful costume of man in summer, all told, is drive, within your gate, which is not hard and free from shirt, slippers, and pantaloons. The compulsory articles of weeds, is as objectionable as an untidy white dress upon a coat, suspenders, waistcoat, and cravat, (gloves would be ri- || lady, and as she would be better clad in russet, your road diculous,) are a tribute paid to the chance of visiters, as is were better covered with grass. I may as well say that a also, probably, some dollars' difference in the quality of the hundred yards of gravel-walk, properly "scored," weeded hat. and rolled, will cost five dollars a month-a man's labour I say nothing of the comfort of a bad hat (one you can sit reckoned at the present usage. Now no person for whom upon, or water your horse from, or bide the storm in, with- this letter is written can afford to keep more than one man out remorse,) nor of the luxury of having half a dozen, which servant for "chores." A hundred yards of gravel-walk, you do when they are cheap, and so saving the mental bur- therefore, employing half his time, you can easily calculate then of retaining the geography of an article so easily mis- the distribution of the remainder, upon the flower-garden, laid. A man is a slave to anything on his person he is afraid kitchen-garden, wood-shed, stable and piggery. (The feto spoil-a slave (if he is not rich, as we are not, dear male "help" should milk, if I died for it!) My own opinreader!) to any costly habiliment whatever. The trees nodion is, that fifty yards from the road is far enough, and no less graciously, (it is a pleasure to be able to say,) be- twenty a more prudent distance, though, in the latter case, cause one's trousers are of a rational volume over the por- an impervious screen of shrubbery along your outer fence tion most tried by a sedentary man, nor because one's hat is is indispensable. of an equivocal shape--having served as a non-conductor The matter of gravel-walks embraces several points of between a wet log and its proprietor. But ladies do-es-rural comfort, and, to do without them, you must have no pecially country ladies; and even if they did not, there is young ladies in your acquaintance, and, especially, no young enough of the leaven of youth, even in philosophers, to make gentlemen from the cities. It may not have occurred to them unwilling to appear to positive disadvantage, and un- you in your sidewalk life, that the dew falls in the country less you are quite at your ease as to even the ridiculous with tolerable regularity; and that, from sundown to ten in shabbiness of your outer man, there is no liberty-no eco- the forenoon, you are as much insulated in a cottage surround. nomical liberty, I mean-in rural life. Do not mislead your-ed with high grass, as on a rock surrounded with forty fathom self, dear reader! I am perfectly aware that a Spanish som-water-shod a la mode, I mean. People talk of being brero, a pair of large French trousers plaited over the hips," pent up in a city" with perhaps twenty miles of flagged a well made English shoe, and a handsome checked shirt, side-walk extending from their door-stone! They are apt form as easy a costume for the country as philosopher could to draw a contrast, favourable to the liberty of cities, howdesire. But I write for men who must attain the same com- ever, if they come thinly shod to the country, and must either fort in a shirt of a perfectly independent description, trou-wade in the grass or stumble through the ruts of a dusty

road. If you wish to see bodies acted on by an "exhausted self-the side of a house or a forest-tree, or an old horse in receiver" (giving out their "airs", of course,) shut up your a pasture. These men, too, like that which is beautiful, and young city friends in a country cottage, by the compulsion || for such I draw this picture of the cottage insoucieuse. of wet grass and muddy high-ways. Better gravel your whole farm, you say. But having reduced you to this point of horror, you are prepared to listen without contempt, while I suggest two humble succedanea.

First-On receiving intimation of a probable visit from a city friend, write by return of post for the size of her foot, (or his). Provide immediately a pair of India rubber shoes of the corresponding number, and on the morning after your friend's arrival, be ready with them at the first horrified withdrawal of the damp foot from the grass. Your shoes may cost you a dollar a pair, but if your visiters are not more than ten or twelve in the season, it is a saving of fifty per cent. at least in gravelling and weeding.

What more simply elegant than a pretty structure in the lap of a green dell! What more convenient! What so economi. cal! Sheep (we may "return to muttons") are cheaper "help" than men, and if they do not keep your green-sward so brightly mown, they crop it faithfully and turn the crop to better account. The only rule of perfect independence in the country is to make no "improvement" which requires more attention than the making. So-you are at liberty to take your wife to the Springs. So-you can join a coterie at Niagara at a letter's warning. So-you can spend a winter in Italy without leaving half your income to servants who keep house at home. So-you can sleep without dread of hail-storms on your graperies or green-houses, without blunderbuss for depredators of fruit, without distress at slugs, cut-worms, drought or breachy cattle. Nature is prodigal of flowers, grapes are cheaper bought than raised, fruit idem, butter idem, (though you mayn't think so,) and as for amusement,-the man who cannot find it between driving, fishing, shooting, strolling, and reading (to say nothing of less selfish pleasures,) has no business in the country. He should go back to town.

We have a pleasant and welcome correspondent who

Or, Second-Enclose the two or three acres immediately about your house with a ring fence, and pasture within it a small flock of sheep. They are clean and picturesque, (your dog should be taught to keep them from the doors and porticos,) and by feeding down the grass to a continual greensward, they give the dew a chance to dry off early and en- || large your cottage "liberties" to the extent of their browsings. I may as well add, by the way, that a walk with the sod simply taken off, is, in this climate, dry enough, except for an hour or two after a heavy rain; and besides the original saving in gravel, it is kept clean with a quarter of the trou-signs himself "R. H. D.," and we have a treasured and adble. A weed imbedded in stones is a much more obstinate customer than a score of them sliced from the smooth ground. At any rate, out with them! A neglected walk indicates that worst of country diseases, a mind grown slovenly and slip-slop! Your house may go unpainted, and your dress (with one exception) submit to the course of events-but be scrupulous in the whiteness of your linen, tena. cious of the neatness of your gravel-walks; and, while these points hold, you are at a redeemable remove from the lapse, (fatally prone and easy,) into barbarianism and misanthropy. Before I enter upon the cultivation of grounds, let me lay before the reader my favourite idea of a cottage—not a cottage ornée but a cottage insoucieuse, if I may coin a phrase. In the Valley of Sweet Waters, on the banks of the Barbyses, there stands a small pleasure palace of the sultan, which looks as if it was dropped into the green lap

of nature, like a jewel-case on a birth-day with neither pre

mired friend known to the world as Richard H. Dana—and they are two different persons. We must beg our friend of the three disembodied initials to give way to the embodied three of the poet, though, as we well know, the three first letters of a man's name may be as momentous to him as the three legs to the "moving tripods" seen in the Indian temples by Apollonius. His miracle may be in them! We ourself have been un-phoenixed of late (we thought there was but one of our kind!) by the discovery that there was another N. P. Willis-(not a quill-pincher, we are pleased to understand.)

"Florian" wishes us to "draw the portrait of a man fit. ted by nature to be an editor." A model editor would be very difficult to describe, but among other things, he should

answer to the description given in the sporting books of the
deadly heelers, steady fighters, good mouthers, and come to
"The best cocks should be close hitters,
dunghill cock.
every point."

The poem sent us without a signature, "on a lady with a sweet breath," implies rather too close quarters for print. Poetry for these days must be at arms' length. The new epithet "pimento breath" ought not to be lost, however— quite the spiciest new word that has lately been rolled under our tongue. It never occurred to us before that there was one word to express cinnamon, nutmegs and cloves. We wish we could manufacture more of these single triplicates. Does our nameless correspondent know, by the way, that bad breath in Prussia is good ground for divorce? We recommend him to write a parody on "Know'st thou the land,"

paration on the part of the bestower, nor disturbance on the part of the receiver. From the balcony's foot on every side extends an unbroken sod to the horizon. Gigantic trees shadow the grass here and there, and an enormous marble vase, carved in imitation of a sea-shell, turns the silver Barbyses in a curious cascade over its lip; but else, it is all Nature's lap, with its bauble resting in velvet-no gardens, no fences, no walls, no shrubberies-a beautiful valley with the sky resting on its rim, and nothing in it save one fairy palace. The simplicity of the thing enchanted me, and, in all my yearnings after rural seclusion, this vision of old travel has, more or less, coloured my fancy. You see what I mean, with half an eye. Gardens are beautiful, shrubberies ornamental, summer-houses and alleys, and gravelled paths, all delightful-but they are, each and all, taxes-heavy taxes on mind, time, and "dollar." Perhaps you like them. Per- The Boston papers are glorifying (as was to be expected) haps you want the occupation. But some men, of small the new volume of poems by Russell Lowell. We wish means, like a contemplative idleness in the country. Some for a sight of it, for we are his self-elected trumpeter, and men's time never hangs heavily under a tree. Some men haste to know the key for a new blast. By the way, we like to lock their doors, (or to be at liberty to do so,) and be have taken the liberty (as the immortality he is bound for gone for a month, without dread of gardens plundered, flow- is a long race) to drop the encumbrance of James from his ers trod down, shrubs browsed off by cattle. Some men musical name, and hereafter we shall economize breath, like nothing out of doors but that which can take care of it-type and harmony by calling him RUSSELL LOWELL.

" &c.