How is an electro-silver vase, or candelabrum, or table ornament, or honorary trophy produced? The answer is full of interest. There is first the artist, the tasteful designer, employed; he exercises all the talent which he may have acquired by nature and education, to produce a design which shall combine fitness of adaptation with grace of form and decoration. Next comes the modeller: he places before him the design which has been laid down on paper, and proceeds to build up a realization of that design: he works upon a mass of smooth wax, which, by the aid of variously shaped tools in wood and bone, he fashions into an exact representation of the article to be produced. To the modeller succeeds the moulder, who makes a mould in lead or some other fusible metal; this would, of jections, and projections instead of hollows. moulder comes the pattern-maker, who, by a simila casting, makes a cast in brass from the lead mould pattern is carefully touched up and finished, and c more perfected edition of the wax model; and it s type, as it were, of all the articles to be produced. again does the casting proceed; for as there was a made from the wax model, so is there now a sand from the brass pattern; and as this brass pattern w from the lead mould, so lastly is there a white meta from the sand mould. The white metal cast is th be produced and sold, though it has not yet received garment. The luxuriant ornament which we are h sing to be under formation, may require other prepa cesses; it may have decorative details in thin me require stamping; it may need the addition of t made from sheets by brazing or hammering; or it n necessary the soldering of many pieces together. B leap over these intermediate processes, and suppose to be completely formed, in a white metal, compos copper, and nickel. It is dipped into a tank contain mical solution of silver, in which also a few sheet silver are immersed. Then comes the mysterious electro-chemistry. The vase or other article being connection with the wires of a battery, a current is g the solution is decomposed, the atoms of silver leav cling to the vase, other atoms of silver leave the re-invigorate the solution, and so the chain of operat ceeds, until the vase is coated with pure silver, atom These atoms cling together; and according to the int the current, the strength of the solution, and the time o sion, does the deposited coat become thicker. TO A FIELD MOUSE. WEE, sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous beastie, Wi' bickering brattle! I wad be laith to rin and chase thee 382 THE STUDY OF THE CLASSICS. THE STUDY OF THE CLASSICS. I AM not one whose lot it has been to grow old in literary retirement, devoted to classical studies with an exclusiveness which might lead to an overweening estimate of these two noble languages. Few, I will not say evil, were the days allowed to me for such pursuits; and I was constrained, still young and an unripe scholar, to forego them for the duties of an active and laborious profession. They are now amusements only, however delightful and improving. Far am I from assuming to understand all their riches, all their beauty, or all their power; yet I can profoundly feel their immeasurable superiority in many important respects to all we call modern; and I would fain think that there are many even among my younger readers who can now, or will hereafter, sympathize with the expression of my ardent admiration. Greek-the shrine of the genius of the old world; as universal as our race, as individual as ourselves; of infinite flexibility, of indefatigable strength, with the complication and the distinctness of nature herself, to which nothing was vulgar, from which nothing was excluded; speaking to the ear like Italian, speaking to the mind like English; with words like pictures, with words like the gossamer film of the summer; at once the variety and the picturesqueness of Homer, the gloom and the intensity of Æschylus; not compressed to the closest by Thucydides, not fathomed to the bottom by Plato, not sounding with all its thunders, nor lit up with all its ardors even under the Promethean touch of Demosthenes! And Latin-the voice of empire and of war, of law and of the state; inferior to its half-parent and rival in the embodying of passion and in the distinguishing of thought, but equal to it in sustaining the measured march of history, and superior to it in the indignant declamation of moral satire; stamped with the mark of an imperial and despotizing republic; rigid in its construction, parsimonious in its synonyms; reluctantly yielding to the flowery yoke of Horace, although opening glimpses of Greek-like splendor in the occasional inspirations of Lucretius; proved indeed to the uttermost by Cicero, and by him found wanting; yet majestic in its bareness, impressive in its conciseness; the true language of history, instinct with the spirit of nations, and not with the pas sions of individuals; breathing the maxims of the world, and not the tenets of the schools; one and uniform in its air and spirit, whether touched by the stern and haughty Sallust, by the open and discursive Livy, by the reserved and thoughtful Tacitus. These inestimable advantages, which no modern skill can wholly counterpoise, are known and felt by the scholar alone. He has not failed, in the sweet and silent studies of his youth, to drink deep at those sacred fountains of all that is just and beautiful in human language. The thoughts and the words of the master-spirits of Greece and of Rome, are inseparably blended in his memory; a sense of their marvellous harmonies, their exquisite fitness, their consummate polish, has sunken for ever in his heart, and thence throws out light and fragrancy upon the gloom and the annoyances of his maturer years. No avocations of professional labor will make him abandon their wholesome study; in the midst of a thousand cares he will find an hour to recur to his boyish lessons-to re-peruse them in the pleasurable consciousness of old associations, and in the clearness of manly judgment, and to apply them to himself and to the world with superior profit. The more extended his sphere of learning in the literature of modern Europe, the more deeply, though the more wisely, will he reverence that of classical antiquity and in declining age, when the appetite for magazines and reviews and the ten times repeated trash of the day has failed, he will retire, as it were, within a circle of school-fellow friends, and end his secular studies, as he began them, with his Homer, his Horace and his Shakspeare. : -H. N. COLERIDGE. YOUTHS AT AN EARLY AGE LEAVING COLLEGE. LIFE is before ye; and while now ye stand Eager to spring upon the promised land, Fair smiles the way, where yet your feet have trod Round ye are youth's green bowers, and to your eyes And if o'er the bright scene some shadows rise, |