the American Medical and Philosophical Register, which he continued through four annual volumes. It was a very creditable enterprise, and now remains for historical purposes one of the most valuable journals of its class. Though dealing largely in the then engrossing topic of epidemics, its pages are by no means confined to medicine. It led the way with the discussion of steam and canal navigation, with papers from Fulton, Stevens, and Morris. Wilson's Ornithology, Livingston's merino sheep-shearing at Clermont, the biography of professional and other worthies, with the universalities of Mitchill, each had a share of its attention. It also contains a number of well executed original engravings; and for all these things it should not be forgotten there was, as usual in those times with such advances in the liberal arts, an unpaid expenditure of brain, and a decidedly unremunerating investment of money. Besides his contributions to this journal, his medical publications include his enlarged edition of Denman's Midwifery, which has several times been reprinted, Cases of Morbid Anatomy, On the Value of Vitriolic Emetics in the Membranous Stage of Croup, Facts and Inferences in Medical Jurisprudence, On the Anatomy of Drunkenness, and Death by Lightning, &c., essays on the cholera of New York in 1832, on the mineral waters of Avon, two discourses before the New York Academy of Medicine, and other minor performances. He John W Francy was also one of the editors, for some time, of the New York Medical and Physical Journal. He has been a prominent actor through the seasons of pestilence in New York for nearly fifty years; and was the first who awakened the attention of the medical faculty of the United States to the fact of the rare susceptibility of the human constitution to a second attack of the pestilential yellow fever, which he made known in his letter on Febrile Contagion, dated London, June, 1816. In general literature, the productions of Francis, though the occupation of moments extorted from his overwrought profession, are numerous. He has largely added to our stock of biographical knowledge by many articles. His account of Franklin in New York has found its way into Valentine's Manual. He has delivered addresses before the New York Horticultural Society in 1829; the Philolexian Society of Columbia College in 1831, the topic of which is the biography of Chancellor Livingston; the discourse at the opening of the New Hall of the New York Lyceum of Natural History in 1836; several speeches at the Historical Society and the Typographical Society of New York, before which he read, at the anniversary in 1852, a paper of Reminiscences of Printers, Authors, and Booksellers of New York, which, as it was afterwards published at length,* constitutes an interesting addition to the literary history of the country. It is filled with vivid pictures of by-gone worthies, and might be readily enlarged from the published as well as conversational stores of the author to a large volume; for Francis has been a liberal contributor to the numerous labors of this kind of the Knapps, Dunlaps, Thachers, and others, from whose volumes he might reclaim many a fugitive page. His notices of Daniel Webster, called forth by the public proceedings after the death of that statesman, have been published by the Common Council of the city. His reminiscences of the novelist Cooper, with whom his relation had been one of long personal friendship, called forth by a similar occasion, appeared in the "Memorial" of the novelist, published in 1852. Dr. Francis is a member of many Medical and Philosophical Associations both abroad and in his native land. In 1850 he received the degree of LL.D. from Trinity College, Connecticut. One of the latest and most characteristic of these biographical sketches is the paper on Christopher Colle, read in 1854t before the New York Historical Society, of which Dr. Francis has been, from an early date, a most efficient supporter. The subject was quaint and learned, with rare opportunities for picturesque description in the fortunes of a simple-minded, enthusiastic city reformer and philosopher, whose slender purse was out of all proportion with his enthusiasm and talent. His virtues were kindly dealt with, and his abilities intelligently set forth; while his "thin-spun life" was enriched by association with the memorable men and things of old New York in his day. While thus inclined to dwell with the past, Dr. Francis, in his genial home, draws together the refined activities of the present. At his house in Bond street, enjoying the frankness and freedom of his warm, unobtrusive hospitality, may be met most of the literary and scientific celebrities of the time, who make their appearance in the metropolis. The humor and character of the host are universal solvents for all tastes and temperaments. Art, science, opera, politics, theology, and, above all, American history and antiquities, are handled, in that cheerful society, with zest and animation. If a dull argument or an In the International Mag. for Feb., 1852. + It has been published in the Knickerbocker Gallery, 1855, over-tedious tale is sometimes invaded by a shock of hearty Rabelaisian effrontery-truth does not suffer in the encounter. The cares and anxieties of professional life were never more happily relieved than in these intellectual recreations. They were shared in lately by one whose early death has been sincerely mourned by many friends. In the beginning of 1855, the eldest son of Dr. Francis, bearing his father's name, at the early age of twenty-two, on the eve of taking his medical degree with high honor, fell by an attack of typhus fever, to which he had subjected himself in the voluntary charitable exercise of his profession. A memorial, privately printed since his death, contains numerous tributes to his virtues and talents, which gave earnest promise of important services to the public in philanthropy and literature. CHRISTOPHER COLLES. As Colles was an instructive representative of much of that peculiarity in the condition and affairs of New York, at the time in which he may be said to have flourished, I shall trespass a moment, by a brief exhibit of the circumstances which marked the period, in which he was, upon the whole, a prominent character. Everybody seemed to know him; no one spoke disparagingly of him. His enthusiasm, his restlessness, were familiar to the citizens at large. He, in short, was a part of our domestic history, and an extra word or two may be tolerated, the better to give him his fair proportions. Had I encountered Colles in any land, I would have been willing to have naturalized him to our soil and institutions. He had virtues, the exercise of which must prove profitable to any people. The biographer of Chaucer has seen fit, inasmuch as his hero was born in Loudon, to give us a history and description of that city at the time of Chaucer's birth, as a suitable introduction to his work. I shall attempt no such task, nor shall I endeavor to make Colles a hero, much as I de ire to swell his dimensions. I shall circumscribe him to a chap-book; he might be distended to a quarto. Yet the ardent and untiring man was so connected with divers affairs, even after he had domesticated himself among us, that every movement in which he took a part must have had a salutary influence on the masses of those days. He was a lover of nature, and our village city of that time gave him a fair opportunity of recreation among the lordly plane, and elm, and catalpa trees of Wall street, Broadway, Pearl street, and the Bowery. The beautiful groves about Richmond Hill and Lispenard Meadows, and old Vauxhall, mitigated the dulness incident to his continuous toil. A trip to the scattered residences of Brooklyn awakened rural associations; a sail to Communipaw gave him the opportunity of studying marls and the bivalves. That divine principle of celestial origin, religious toleration, seems to have had a strong hold on the people of that day; and the persecuted Priestley, shortly after he reached our shores, held forth in the old Presbyterian Church in Wall street, doubtless favored in a measure by the friendship of old Dr. Rodgers, a convert to Whitefield, and a pupil of Witherspoon. This fact I received from John Pintard. Livingston and Rodgers, Moore and Provoost, supplied the best Christian dietetics his panting desires needed; while in the persons of Bayley and Kissam, and Hosack and Post, he felt secure from the misery of dislocations and fractures, and that alarming pest, the yellow fever. He saw the bar occupied with such advocates as Hamilton and Burr, Hoffman and Colden, and he dreaded neither the assaults of the lawless nor the chicanery of contractors. The old Tontine gave him more daily news than he had time to digest, and the Argus and Minerva, Freneau's Time-Piece, and Swords' New York Magazine, inspired him with increased zeal for liberty, and a fondness for belles-lettres. The city library had, even at that early day, the same tenacity of purpose which marks its career at the present hour. There were literary warehouses in abundance. Judah had decorated his with the portrait of Paine, and here Colles might study Common Sense and the Rights of Man, or he might stroll to the store of Duyckinck, the patron of books of piety, works on education, and Noah Webster; or join tête-à-tête with old Hugh Gaine, or James Rivington, and Philip Freneau; now all in harmony, notwithstanding the withering satire against those accommodating old tories, by the great bard of the revolutionary crisis. The infantile intellect of those days was enlarged with Humpty-Dumpty and Hi-diddle-diddle. Shopwindows were stored with portraits of Paul Jones and Truxton, and the musical sentiment broke forth in ejaculations of Tally Ho! and old Towler in one part of the town, and, in softer accents, with Rousseau's Dream in another. Here and there, too, might be found a coterie gratified with the crescendo and diminuendo of Signor Trazetta: nearly thirty years elapsed from this period ere the arrival of the Garcia troupe, through the efforts of our lamented Almaviva, Dominick Lynch, the nonpareil of society, when the Italian opera, with its unrivalled claims, burst forth from the enchanting voice of that marvellous company. The years 1795-1800 were unquestionably the period in which the treasures of the German mind were first developed in this city by our exotic and indigenous writers. That learned orientalist, Dr. Kunze, now commenced the translations into English of the German Hymns, and Strebeck and Milledoler gave us the Catechism of the Lutherans. The Rev. Mr. Will, Charles Smith, and William Dunlap, now supplied novelties from the German dramatic school, and Kotzebue and Schiller were found on that stage where Shakespeare had made his first appearance in the New World in 1752. Colles had other mental resources, as the gaieties and gravities of life were dominant with him. The city was the home of many noble spirits of the Revolution; General Stevens of the Boston Tea-party was here, full of anecdote, Fish of Yorktown celebrity, and Gates of Saratoga, always accessible. There existed in New York, about these times, a war of opinion, which seized even the medical faculty. The Bastile had been taken. French speculations looked captivating, and Genet's movements won admiration, even with grave men. In common with others, our schoolmasters partook of the prevailing mania; the tri-colored cockade was worn by numerous schoolboys, as well as by their seniors. The yellow-fever was wasting the population; but the patriotic fervor, either for French or English politics, glowed with ardor. With other boys I united in the enthusiasm. The Carmagnole was heard everywhere. I give a verse of a popular song echoed throughout the streets of our city, and heard at the Belvidere at that period. America that lovely nation, Once was bound, but now is free; Strains like this of the Columbian bards in those days of party-virulence emancipated the feelings of many a throbbing breast, even as now the songs, of pregnant simplicity and affluent tenderness, by Morris, afford delight to a community pervaded by a calmer spirit, and controlled by a loftier refinement. Moreover, we are to remember that in that early age of the Republic an author, and above all a poet, was not an every-day article. True, old Dr. Smith, the brother of the historian, and once a chemical professor in King's College, surcharged with learning and love, who found Delias and Daphnes everywhere, might be seen in the public ways, in his velvet dress, with his madrigals for the beautiful women of his select acquaintance; but the buds of promise of the younger Low (of a poetic family) were blighted by an ornithological error: "Tis morn, and the landscape is lovely to view, The nightingale warbles her song in the grove. Weems had not yet appeared in the market with his Court of Hymen and his Nest of Love; Cliffton was pulmonary; Beach, recently betrothed to Thalia, was now dejected from dorsal deformity; Linn, enceinte with the Powers of Genius, had not yet advanced to a parturient condition; Townsend, sequestered amidst the rivulets and groves near Oyster Bay, had with ambitious effort struck the loud harp, but the Naiads and the Dryads were heedless of his melodious undulations; Wardell's declaration To the tuneful Apollo I now mean to hollow! was annunciatory-and nothing more; and Searson, exotic by birth, yet domesticated with us, having made vast struggles in his perilous journey towards Mount Parnassus, had already descended, with what feelings is left to conjecture, by the poet's closing lines of his Valedictory to his muse. Poets like grasshoppers, sing till they die, Yet, in this world, some laugh, some sing, some cry. The Mohawk reviewers, as John Davis called the then critics of our city, thought, with the old saying, that "where there is so much smoke, there must be some fire." But it is no longer questionable, that our Castalian font was often dry, and when otherwise, its stream was rather a muddy rivulet than a spring of living waters. It needs our faithful Lossing to clear up the difficulties of that doubtful period of patriotism and of poetry. ELIZA TOWNSEND. ELIZA TOWNSEND was descended from an ancient and influential family, and was born in Boston in 1789. She was a contributor of poems to the Monthly Anthology, the Unitarian Miscellany, and the Port Folio, during the publication of those magazines, and to other periodicals. Her productions were anonymous, and the secret of their authorship was for some time preserved. They are almost entirely occupied with religious or moral reflection, are elevated in tone, and written in an animated and harmonious manner. They are not numerous, are all of moderate length, and have never been collected. The verses on The Incomprehensibility of God; An Occasional Ode, written in June, 1809, and published at the time in the Monthly Authology, in which she comments with severity on the career of Napoleon, then at the summit of his greatness; Lines to Robert Southey, written in 1812; The Rainbow, published in the General Repository and Review, are her best known productions. She died at her residence in Boston, January 12, 1854. Miss Townsend was much esteemed, not only for the high merit of her few literary productions but for the cultivation and vigor of her mind, her conversational powers, and her many amiable qualities.* INCOMPREHENSIBILITY OF GOD. “I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him.” Where art thou?-THOU! Source and Support of all That is or seen or felt; Thyself unseen, So fondly tenanted with better things Are deaf and speechless here! Fatigued, I turn And close mine eyes, and bid the thought turn inward. From each material thing its anxious guest, For light like this Peace, my proud aim, On Him-the Unrevealed-learn hence, instead, THE RAINBOW. Seen through the misty southern air, Whose mellowing shades of different dyes, Obituary Notice by the Rev. Convers Francis, D.D., of the Theological School of Harvard College; published in the Boston Daily Advertiser. Griswold's Female Poets of America. And now that gleam of painted light, What curious mechanician wrought, Have bent this flexile bow? What seraph-touch these shades could blend Without beginning, without end? What sylph such tints bestow? If Fancy's telescope we bring Of eastern gold combined. Vain vision hence! That will revere O Peace! the rainbow-emblemed maid, Sails it on gales of morn? Missioned from heaven in early hour, Till exiled thence in evil time, E'er since that hour, alas! the thought! Still from the east, the south, the north, Till, when the west its world displayed In vain-from this thy last abode, Where yonder cliffs arise; Saw thee thy tearful features shroud For now the maniac-demon War, Claims these remaining shores. But thou, around whose holy head With buds that paradise bestowed, For thee our fathers ploughed the strand, For thee they left that goodly land, The turf their childhood trod; The hearths on which their infants played, Then, by their consecrated dust Now near their Maker's face, By their privations and their cares, Descend to mortal ken confest, That snowy mantle see; Oh let not here thy mission close, Our honoured guest once more; January, 1818. SARAH J. HALE, SARAH JOSEPHA BUELL was born at the town of Newport, New Hampshire. Her education was principally directed by her mother and a brother in college, and was continued after her marriage by her husband, David Hale, an eminent lawyer and well read man. On his death in 1822, she was left dependent upon her own exertions for her support and that of her five children, the eldest of whom was but seven years old, and as a resource she turned to literature. A volume, The Genius of Oblivion and other original poems, was printed in Concord in 1823, for her benefit by the Freemasons, a body of which her husband had been a member. In 1827 she published Northwood, a novel in two volumes. In 1828, she accepted an invitation to become editor of "The Ladies' Magazine," published at Boston, and removed in consequence to that city. In 1837 the magazine was united with the Lady's Book, a Philadelphia monthly, the literary charge of which was placed and still remains in her hands. She has published Sketches of American Character; Traits of American Life; The Way to live well and to be well while we live; Grostenor, a Tragedy (founded on the Revolutionary story of the execution of Col. Isaac Hayne of South Carolina); Alice Ray, a Romance in Rhyme; Harry Guy, the Widow's Son, a story of the sea (also in verse); Three Hours, or, the Vigil of Love, and other Poems. Part of these have been reprinted from the magazines edited by her, which also contain a large number of tales and sketches in prose and verse from her pen not yet collected. Mrs. Hale's stories are brief, pleasant narratives, drawn generally from the every-day course of American life. Her poems are for the most part narrative and reflective and are written with force and elegance. One of the longest, Three Hours, or the Vigil of Love, is a story whose scene is laid in New England, and deals with the spiritual and material fears the early colonists were subjected to from their belief in witchcraft and the neighborhood of savage foes. In 1853 Mrs. Hale published Woman's Record, or Sketches of all Distinguished Women, from" the Beginning" till A.D. 1850. In this work, which forms a large octavo volume of nine hundred and four pages, she has furnished biographical notices of the most distinguished of her sex in every period of history. Though many of the articles are necessarily brief, and much of it is a compilation from older cyclopædias, there are numerous papers of original value. The Record includes of course many distinguished in the field of authorship, and in these cases extracts are given from the productions which have gained eminence for their writers. The choice of names is wide and liberal, giving a fair representation of every field of female exertion. Mrs. Hale has also prepared A Complete Dictionary of Poetical Quotations, containing Selections from the Writings of the Poets of England and America, in a volume of six hundred double column octavo pages, edited a number of annuals, written several books for children, and a volume on cookery. IT SNOWS. "It snows!" cries the school-boy-" hurrah!" and his shout Is ringing through parlor and hall, It makes the heart leap but to witness their joy,- Like the rapture that throbs in the pulse of the boy, "It snows!" sighs the imbecile-"Ah!" and his breath Comes heavy, as clogged with a weight; When the fear we shall die only proves that we live! There's the clear, glowing hearth, and the table prepared, And his wife with their babes at her knee. Blest thought! how it lightens the grief-laden hour, That those we love dearest are safe from its power. "It snows!” cries the Belle,-"Dear how lucky,” and turns From her mirror to watch the flakes fall; Like the first rose of summer, her dimpled cheek burns While musing on sleigh-ride and ball: There are visions of conquest, of splendor, and mirth, Turn, turn thee to Heaven, fair maiden, for bliss "It snows!" cries the widow,-" Oh, God!" and her sighs Have stifled the voice of her prayer, Its burden ye'll read in her tear-swollen eyes, On her cheek, sunk with fasting and care. "Tis night-and her fatherless ask her for breadBut" He gives the young ravens their food," And she trusts, till her dark hearth adds horror to dread, And she lays on her last chip of wood. Poor suff'rer! that sorrow thy God only knows"Tis a pitiful lot to be poor, when it snows! JOB DURFEE. JOB DURFEE was born at Tiverton, Rhode Island, September 20, 1790. He entered Brown University in 1809, and on the conclusion of his academic course studied law and was licensed to practise. In 1814 he was elected a member of the state legislature, and six years afterwards of the national House of Representatives. He dis Jobsringee. tinguished himself in Congress by his advocacy of the interests of his state in the bill providing for a new apportionment of representatives, and by his moderate course on the tariff. He remained in Congress during two terms. In 1826 he was re-elected to the state legislature, but after a service of two years declined a re-nomination, and retired to his farm, where he devoted himself to literature, and in 1832 published a small edition of his poem of Whatcheer. In 1833 he was appointed associate, and two years after chief-justice of the Supreme Court of the state. He continued in this office until his death, July 26, 1847. His works were collected in one octavo volume, with a memoir by his son, in 1849. They consist of his Whatcheer and a few juvenile verses, mostly of a fanciful character; a few historical addresses; an abstruse philosophical treatise, entitled Panidea, the object of which is to show the pervading influence and presence of the Deity throughout nature; and a few of his judicial charges. Whatcheer is a poem of nine cantos, each containing some fifty or sixty eight-line stanzas. It is a versified account of Roger Williams's departure from Salem, his journey through the wilderness, interviews with the Indians, and the settle |