vivid colors, but also the corresponding | consider that to train a horse, which is so grade of mordant, which fixes and makes small compared to the elephant, a bit and these colors eternal. The Indian spinster, spurs of steel, and reins and bridles are with her native instinct and no other ma- needed, it must have seemed an almost chine than her spindle and her delicate hopeless undertaking to curb and restrain hands, will obtain a thread of incredible by force this living mountain, this mighty fineness, with which the most intricate and Colossus. beautiful designs are executed.

They succeeded, however, and nothing could have been greater or more beautiful. It was a moral victory. They treated the elephant as if he were a man, a wise man, a Brahmin, and he was influenced by it, and behaved accordingly. To-day the treatment is similar; the elephant has two servants to look after him, to remind him of his duties, and to warn him if he deviates from Brah manical decorum. The cornac sits on his neck, scratches his ears, guides him and rules him by the voice, teaching him how to be have himself: while the other servant walks beside him and teaches him the same lesson with a firm tone and equal tenderness of manner.

Some one has said: "Instead of sending to Cashmere some hideous designs of shawls, which would corrupt the Indian taste, let us send our pattern-drawers to India to contemplate its brilliant nature and to imbibe its pure light." But it would be necessary that these designers should also catch the soul and the profound harmony of India, for between the great calmness of the patient soul of the Hindoo and the subduing mildness of the nature that surrounds him, there is such a complete agreement that the man and the native can scarcely realize that each is distinct from the other. Nor is this the effect of quietude simply, as some believe, but of that singular faculty, peculiar to the race, of seeing life at the bottom of every thing, and the soul in every living body. The herb is not simply an herb, nor the tree only a tree, but both herb and tree are the vehicles for the circulation of the divine spirit; and the animal is not all animal, but a soul that has been or will be a man. Without this faith they could never have accomplished the first and most necessary of all arts in the earliest times, the art of taming and humanizing the most important and useful servants, without which man could not have long existed. Without the dog and the elephant, man would have been at the mercy of the lion and the tiger. The books of Persia and India relate in a gratified manner how the dog was the first preserver of man, and how the men of those days formed friendships and entered into alliances with the very strong and large dogs who could strangle the lion. And in the Mahabharata it is narrated that the hero of that poem declined the reward of heaven unless he could enter Paradise with his dog. In lower India and in hot climates where the dog was lacking in strength, or was easily alarmed, and fled from the tiger, men invoked the protection of the elephant; but this was a more difficult alliance, for though the elephant becomes gentle in maturity, it is brutal, irascible, and capricious in youth, and terrible in its gluttony, and in its Twas at the royal feast, for Persia won,

At present some writers speak very lightly about all that. The elephant has not only been disparaged, but has greatly de generated. He has known servitude, and has felt the power of man. But in earlier times he was fierce and indomitable, and to have made him teachable and tractable must have required great boldness, calmness, affection, and sincere faith. they religiously believed what they said to him. They respected the soul of the dead in the body of the living; for according to the doctrines of their holy sages, the spirit of some departed one lived in the command. ing and speechless form.

amusements, and therefore was scarcely less formidable than the tiger. And when we

Then

When they saw him in the morning, at the hour in which the tiger leaves his ambush of night, coming deliberately out of the dense jungle and going majestically to drink of the waters of the Ganges, empurpled by the dawn, they confidently believed that he, too, hailing the open day, became impregnated by Vishnu, the All Pervading, the good Sun, and while immersing in this great soul, incarnated in himself a divine ray.

ALEXANDER'S FEAST; OR THE
POWER OF MUSIC.

AN ODE ON ST. CECILIA'S DAY.

By Philip's warlike son;
Aloft in awful state