LA BRANCH D'AMANDIER. De l'amandier tige fleurie, Fleurit et tombe avant l'été. Qu'on la néglige ou qu'on la cueille, Comme nos plaisirs jour à jour. Savourons ces courtes délices, De ces parfums qui vont mourir. Souvent la beauté fugitive Ressemble à la fleur du matin, Qui du front glacé du convive Tombe avant l'heure du festin. Un jour tombe, un autre se lève ; Et, puisqu'il faut qu'elles périssent, Que sous les lèvres de l'Amour! DE LAMARTine. Quarantième Méditation. THE BRANCH OF THE ALMOND TREE. SYMBOL of beauty's pride, Bright branch of the almond-tree! Life's flower ere summer-tide Blushes and falls like thee. Neglected or gather'd,-still brief, From our brows, from Love's grasp away It withereth leaf by leaf, As our pleasures day by day. Then, ere on the breeze they fleet, And we'll drain the chalice sweet Of its fragrance that breathes to perish. Too often doth beauty's glow Resemble the morning flow'r, Which falls from the death-chill'd brow Time is waning day by day, Fleets swiftly the spring-tide fair,- Then, since they must perish for ever,— Oh! let them wither never Save under the lips of Love! THE LETTER-BOX.-No. 1. Nor the least relief to the irksomeness of Editorship (how we apples swim!) has been afforded by the many kind letters which have poured in upon us from all quarters. Were it not that a premature disclosure of our state-secrets would be unadvisable, we should certainly be tempted to lay before our readers very many as pretty examples of the delicate and facete in letter-writing, as it has ever fallen to our lot to see. These, however, we must keep for a corps de réserve on the final dismantling of our Magazine, and in the meantime will put forth only such regular troops of the line as will keep up the general engagement, while they cover the manoeuvring at head-quarters. H. M. TO THE EDITORS OF THE CARTHUSIAN. Oxford, College, October 13, 1837. WELL-BELOVED THREE, ONE would suppose, by your request for an epistle touching the concerns of this my literary foster-mother, that she were a subject on which the pen could run as easily and as agreeably as it has done in the hands of the good and true Carthusians who have hitherto helped to fill your pages; but truly it is now-a-days no pleasing task to sit down and write a letter, whose chief and prime subject is to be the degenerate Rhedycina. Alas for Oxford! Her glory, if not absolutely defunct, is at least very rapidly departing; her timehonoured customs are gradually on the wane: she is daily growing duller and more torpid; and a 'fast' man I will soon be as undiscoverable within her walls as the longitude or the perpetual motion. Where be now the pranks, where the hair-breadth 'scapes, where the Town and Gown battles-royal which were wont to keep the High-street in a roar? Alas! where? There is not a sign-board disturbed, there is not a gas-lamp broken, along its whole extent. The Proctor stalks along its pavement in undisputed majesty, and a prostrated Bull-dog is, like Rachel's children, among the things which are not. Our very dress has undergone an alteration. The venerable brown hue, erst so much sought after in the gown of an Oxonian,-the rents and patches once cherished as the signs and records of honourable service, are fast giving place to prim and spotless garments of solemn black; and the demand for new Trenchers is at present three times as great as it was ever known to be, even in the very hottest days of Academic warfare. I seriously expect that, after the lapse of a few more terms, a "beaver" will be an article as unknown in the wardrobe of a Gownsman as a banknote in his exchequer; and that the first intelligence which will greet my eyes in the columns of the Oxford Herald for November, 1840, will be the heart-rending detail of the melancholy and simultaneous suicide of Messrs. Juggins and Castle. I remember to have conversed with a Scout in whose recollection the days (or rather nights,) were yet fresh when, according to the old catch, "never a man would leave his can" till he had effectually put such a desertion out of his power; in other words, till some friendly wheelbarrow arrived to transport him from the symposium at which the flow of soul had been far exceeded by that of the seductive "Bishop," or the still more fas cinating "Cardinal." In his day, the Heads of Houses were distinguished by a rotundity of paunch apparently unattainable by the present generation; and a Fellow of a College was always to be known by a rubicundity of nose which is now preserved only in the recollection of its quondam admirers. Sometimes, indeed, though but rarely, the youth of Academus may still catch, as it were, a glimpse of bygone times, when the worthies of other days come trooping up to Oxford to defend in Convocation the rights and interests of their cherished Alma-Mater. Then, and then only, it is that the admiring student watches, rolling along the High-street, forms which have as yet had an existence only in the legends of an antiquated porter, or the faded and uncared-for portraits which serve to hide the naked walls of his College library. Then it is that the anomaly of the gown of the resident master, surmounted by the shovel-hat of the West-country parson, presents itself to the astonished eyes, then it is that the loud and hearty laugh, awakened by the recollection of past adventures, bursts upon the shocked and bewildered ears of the dashing Gentleman Commoner of 1837. Then it is that the Freshman, before whose mind's eye are ever floating bright visions of Academic honours, gazes in speechless wonder at the unaccustomed forms; despising, in his "heart of hearts," the ignoble spirits who attended to the laws of Good fellowship far more closely than to those of Logic, and preferred tracking a Fox through the intricacies of Bagley to hunting for sense among the philosophical obscurities of his idolized Aristotle. The fame of the man who rides from Morn to dewy Eve to the cheering music of hound and horn, is mute in comparison with his who pores from Matin Prime till |