PREFATORY NOTE. CUSTOM and convenience require that every work, like that now presented to the reader, should have a title in order to distinguish it from other contemporaneous publications of the same nature. Juliet says 66 What's in a name?-that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet." Immaterial, however, as a name may be, on some occasions, the selection of one for a new periodical is beset with more than ordinary difficulties. In an age like the present, prolific in an unprecedented degree, with literary miscellanies, almost every appellation suitable to such works has been appropriated, and the new aspirant for public patronage must either put up with one which is not the best suited to his purpose, or must borrow one already adopted by some contemporary, which seems like poaching on another man's preserve. Rather than thus trespass, or lack proper courtesy, we have chosen a title which has not, we believe, been hitherto applied, except to a musical work. We should have preferred an English word, but cannot discover one which has not been already adopted, and we have therefore, named our miscellany "The MELANGE,' which is, at once, significant and unostentatious, according to the following definition of Chambaud: MELANGE " Plusieurs pièces de prose ou de poësie, qui l'on recueille en même volume." The reader will perceive, that in the course of this work, the first person singular is employed in several of the articles, whilst the first person plural is adopted in others. This change of person arises from the circumstances under which some of the pieces were originally written. Sometimes they were published editorially, in which case the usual plural unit" was, of course, employed, while other articles were written as from a correspondent. We have heard it intimated that there is something of ostentation or egotism in the use of this said plural unit, which is confined to monarchs and editors;-but we conceive the reverse to be the fact, and we shall adduce in defence of the practice, the authority of a celebrated satirist. Pascal ridiculed those egotists who said "my book," 66 my commentary,' my history ;" and observed, that to say, "our book," "our commentary," "our history," would be much better, since there is in them much more of other peoples' than their own. THE MELANGE. THE ELYSIUM OF ANIMALS. A DREAM.-NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED. “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast."-Proverbs xii. 10. "I would not enter on my list of friends, (Though grac'd with polish'd manners and fine sense, Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.”—Cowper. "The lion, the libbard, and the bear, Graze with the fearless flocks;-all bask at noon Together; or all gambol in the shade Of the same grove, and drink one common stream; INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. THE BALLOON. The ascent of a balloon, on a fine day, amidst the enthusiastic cheers of a countless multitude of delighted spectators, is one of the most splendid and imposing spectacles that can be witnessed, or pictured to the imagination. The mind, in contemplating the scene, recognizes the beau idéal of the "sublime and beautiful;"-it is alternately absorbed in admiration of human skill and perseverance exemplified in this philosophical triumph of art over obstacles apparently B insurmoutable, and in astonishment at the courage and enterprise of the first aëronaut, who, confident in the accuracy of his theory, dared to quit his native earth and soar aloft into an element which until that moment had been traversed only by the fowls of the air; unless we are to believe that the flight of Dædalus and Icarus is not a mere flight of poetical imagination.* * We are not so unreasonable as to require that ancient mythological fables should be submitted to the test of too rigid an examination by the rules of modern philosophy. We would, on the contrary, allow all pos sible latitude to the poetic imagination in which these venerable heathen legends had their origin, because we discover in them much instruction conveyed in the most fascinating guise. We must not, however, suffer our early classical predilections to blind us to the fact that the ancients occasionally betrayed the grossest ignorance of the laws of nature, which should never be outraged even in fable. The fable of Dædalus and Icarus affords evidence of the fact. Had the author of the fiction simply related that the father and son escaped from Crete, by means of wings, leaving us moderns to guess at the means in which those wings were adapted, we might have believed it possible that the art of flying was known to the ancients, and like many other arts has been lost to the world. But the author of the fable has, unfortunately, entered into details which render his story absurd, and the catastrophe impossible. The wings were, it seems, fastened on by means of wax, which was melted by the heat of the sun, in the upper regions. The inventor of this fable imagined that the solar heat increases as we recede from the earth, whereas the contrary is the fact; and if any modern Icarus should succeed in flying by means of wings attached to the body by wax, he would find that the cement, so far from softening as he ascended, would harden. Had the ancient poet or fabulist ever ascended a mountain, he might have discovered that the heat diminished as he proceeded upwards. The sun being the source of heat, it is natural to conclude that the temperature would increase as we approximate that body; but experience is at variance with such a conclusion. The most probable theory is, that although the sun is the fountain of heat and light, it is not, as Sir Isaac Newton and others have conjectured, a globe of fire, constantly radiating heat, and, of course, requiring per petual replenishment. It is much more analogous to the simplicity and economy of nature, to presume that the action of the sun upon the atmosphere, be it chemical, electrical, or what it may, is the cause of heat; that it imparts light, heat, and life to animal and vegetable nature, without itself experiencing any decay;-and "operates unspent." This theory is, we say, consonant with the economy of nature, which always produces its effects by the least complicated means. The supposition that The exquisitely graceful form of the balloon itself, with its gay and variegated colours, reflected in the sun, and its light and elegant car suspended by slender and almost invisible cords, greatly enhance the interest of such an exhibition. The pleasure of the spectator is, however, somewhat alloyed by reflecting upon the manifold perils to which the bold adventurer may be exposed, against which no human foresight can provide, and from which no human skill can extricate him. Abandoned to the caprice of the elements, over which he possesses no means of control, he may be driven far from his native shores, to distant and unknown regions, a prey to cold, hunger, and death in its most frightful shapes. The frail silken bubble on which he rests his dependence may be suddenly rent asunder by internal expansion, when elevated miles above the earth; or the forked lightning may, in an instant, ignite its inflammable the sun was a huge globe of red hot matter, constantly wasting and in need of fuel like our culinary fires, has led philosophers into many absurdities, amongst which was the notion that the use of comets was to replenish the waning fires of the solar body. In a future number of the Melange we shall introduce a song written several years ago on Comets, in which this absurd hypothesis is thus noticed : "Some think they take coals to the sun There is nothing paradoxical in the theory that the sun can communicate warmth, without exhausting its heating property; as we have evidence of an analogous phenomenon in magnetism. From one magnet, we know that a hundred or a thousand magnets may be formed, each as powerful or more powerful than the original one, which will not lose any of its virtue by the process. Why, therefore, may not the sun be endowed with the property of producing heat without being exhausted by the operation? A similar instance of the economy of nature in thus" operating unspent " is to be found in the phenomena of vegetation: let the earth in a flower pot, before any flower is placed therein, be thoroughly dried and weighed, and then let a seed or plant be set in it, and allowed to grow into a large shrub, it will be found that the soil itself, which has thus apparently fed the plant to maturity, has not lost the smallest particle in weight in the process. |