class="i2">Was really dreadfully shocking!

The Times, a poem read before the Boston Mercantile Library Association, in 1849, Carmen Lætum, recited last year at a meeting of the Alumni of Middlebury College, and New England Men, delivered before the literary societies of the New-York University a few weeks ago, are his other most elaborate productions, and they are all carefully finished and alike in their chief characteristics. His shorter pieces in a few instances have touches of sentiment, but this is not his forte; by the definition which limits poetry to rhythmical creations of beauty, Mr. Saxe can scarcely be called a poet of great excellence; his distinction is, that he is a wit, and that he has been eminently successful in giving to his wit a poetical expression.

As a judicious critic has said of him, "he unquestionably an artist, of a high order, in the narrow range which he has taken. His comical productions are beautifully finished. As they stand, they are terse, smooth, and fluent, and any one who has ever tried his hand at this species of composition, will readily appreciate the time, labor, and taste, which must have been expended, to jest so easily, in rhyme."

GLASS OF BOHEMIA.

This beautiful article is manufactured in various places throughout Germany—most largely amid the very mountainous districts of Bohemia; some of the best, however, is made in Bavaria and sent to Bohemia, and thence exported. The materials from which the glass is formed consist chiefly of the same as those used in England; the manufacturers themselves seem to believe that there is no difference except in the proportions of the materials, and in the fuel, which is exclusively wood, and produces, by a little attention, a more constant and intense heat than can be produced by any coal; the feeding of the furnace with the latter material, they say, always creates a change in the temperature detrimental to the fluid above, and never sufficiently intense. The wooded mountains of Bohemia are entirely inhabited by a population whose industry, morals, hospitality, and kindliness of manners, do honor, not only to this rich and beautiful kingdom, but to the whole human race. They are pure Germans, not of Sclavish origin, and the German dialect alone is spoken. Unlike every other manufacturing district I have ever visited, they retain unimpaired all their rural and primitive virtues. Clean to a proverb, in their houses and persons, hospitable and amiable in their manners, simple in their habits, cheerful and devoted in their religion, they form perhaps, the happiest community in the world. In passing through the country, a stranger would never find out that he was in a manufacturing district, but might fancy himself in the green valleys of a partly pastoral, partly agricultural people. Thickly inhabited, the beautiful little cottages, clustered into villages, or scattered along the glens, or sides of the hills, are embowered with fruit trees, and encircled with shrubs and flowers, which each cottager cultivates with a zeal peculiar to his race; on every side rich fields of grain or pasture stretch out like a vast enamelled carpet between the hills, which are clothed in dense forest of spruce, fir, pine, and beech, filled with deer, roe, and capercalzie; they extend in every direction, far beyond the reach of the eye, one vast cloud of verdure. The fabriques or factories, are placed generally in the middle of one of these villages, the extent of which can only be known by going from house to house; so closely is each hid in its own fruit-bower, and so surrounded by shrubs and flowers, that the eye can only pick up the buildings by their blue smoke, or get a glimpse of them here and there as you advance; thus some of the villages are elongated to three miles, forming the most delicious walk along its grassy road, generally accompanied by a stream, always overhung by a profusion of wild flowers, the mountain-ash, and weeping birch; many of the former only to be found in our gardens. It has a very picturesque effect to see the inhabitants of these villages with their simple costume; and if it rains, their umbrellas, often of rich colors like their glass, scarlet, green, and deep crimson, with beautiful ruby, emerald, or turquoise handles; not such as a stranger might suppose a gaudy glass bauble, but rich and massive, and having all the appearance of the solid, gold, and gem-studded handles of the oriental weapons.

The fabrique is built like the rest of the cottages, and only differs from them in size, and the shape and height of its chimney, which emitting only wood smoke, has none of the dense sulphuric cloud which blackens and poisons the neighborhood of coal-fed factories: it is never that ostentatious building for whose magnitude and embellishments the public are obliged to pay, in the increased charges on its productions. The glass fabriques of Bohemia are all small, in fact only one large apartment, in the centre of which is the furnace, a circular structure divided into eight compartments containing the melted metal for as many colors; one man and a boy are stationed at the door of each compartment, the former to extract the fluid with his pipe, the latter to hold the wooden mould[1] in which the article is blown and shaped. The number of hands employed in an ordinary fabrique, are:—Eight men who work in the metal, take it from the fire, and blow it in the moulds; eight helps to hold the moulds, &c.; four to stir the metal, &c.; two breakers; four day laborers.

The best men are sometimes paid from eighteen to twenty shillings a week, and provide their own food, which is good; and as they require much nourishment from the exhausting effects of the heat, it consists of meat, vegetables, and a vast quantity of beer; those who are employed about the furnace especially, drink from twelve to fifteen quarts a day; it is a clear, bitter beverage, which they, in common with all the German race, like beyond every thing else, but it is of little strength; intoxication is almost unknown, and as a proof of their careful and excellent character, in one of the above-mentioned villages, three miles in length, a fire had not been known in the memory of the oldest inhabitants I questioned, though the houses from the ground to the roof are made entirely of wood.

The materials of which the glass is composed, as far as can be ascertained, and they seem to make no secret of it, appear to be the same as those in use in England; they say, they derive their perfection from their mode of mixing and burning the material. Thus the principal component parts are:—Sand; chalk; potash; brimstone; arsenic, mixed with various colors, regulated by the principal:—Uran oxide; cobalt oxide; coppré oxide; nickel oxide; chrom oxide; minium; tin oxide.

The gold used in ornamenting the glass is from the purest ducats, dissolved in strong acid (artz wasser), the oil with which the colors are mixed is of turpentine (harz öhl).

BOHEMIAN GLASS PAINTER.

Nothing is done in most of the blowing fabriques but mixing the material, and coloring; and for cutting, polishing, &c., from three to six wheels are used—all the finishing goes on in the little cottages by which the furnace is surrounded, and with which the valleys and