And when the gust is filled with rain,

And mist along the mountain rolls, He mourns the naked spirit's pain,

And says: "God comfort the poor souls!"

One night in all the year, he deems

Those homeless souls may pass the doorBask in the hearth's domestic beams, And taste the food of man once more.

That night the house is dress'd and swept,
And door and window open thrown;
The hoarded turf a-blaze is kept-

The household loaf and milk put down.

Old Patrick and his mate had rear'd

Their brood, and all had taken wingBlessed, e'er their flight, by lips revered, Save one, a fair deluded thing.

None come again; in storm or war,

Or wreck, they knew each dear one's sleep; But knew not hers, and wept the more,

Not knowing what they had to weep.

But grief had ceased to throb and start;
Veiled by life's common cares, he lay
A heavy slumberer in the heart-

Save on the Dead Man's Holiday.

That day he woke, and longed to hear
Dear voices murmur on his brain;
And felt, with weary soul, the drear
Vain longing to be glad again.

Ten of these Hallow-e'ens had fled,

Since, for their last, their eyes were wet; And now once more the board was spreadThe seat before the fire was set.

The door stood open to the sky,

That shivering souls might enter in; And stormy winds were blowing high,

Chasing the clouds across the scene.

The moon, at times, white radiance threw-
Quick growing, fading quick away;
Once steadfast more, that radiance grew,
As on the threshold, fain to stay—

It took a seeming form and motion-
A shape among the shades grew plain :
"Save us! O Mary !—dreadful notion-
The spirit takes its clay again!"

It pauses, cowering low-ah, no!
Do I the grave's indweller trace?
Yet, husband! wherefore look'st thou so?
Dost thou, too, see a once-known face ?"

"Oh, God! it moves!-Nay, come not near! What art thou? Stay thy step so wild : See, on its face a human tear

What world sends back my hapless child?"

"Mother! the grave has not yet given
Its welcome to thy child forlorn;
No leave to die, from pitying heaven,
Has Grief, my stern familiar, borne.

Once from this home I took my flight;
Long time I fear'd the home I fled;
But from afar I've toiled to night,
To enter with the happy dead.

I live; but life is cold and drear;

God's storms and man's about me roll:

'Tis Mercy's day-oh, Father dear!
Oh, mother! pardon the poor soul."

V.

MAUVE AND MAGENTA.

BY ROBERT HUNT, F.R.S.

THE ancients prided themselves upon the possession of the Tyrian Purple, obtained, by a peculiar process, from one of the Mollusca of the Egean Sea. The moderns may, with far more reason, be proud of their Perkins's Purple, derived, by the refinements of chemical science, from refuse matter of our gasworks. To the story of the modern colour we invite attention, premising that under the generic term given above, originating in the name of the inventor, Mr. W. H. Perkins, we include Mauve, Magenta, Solfarina, Azaleine, Roseine, Violine, Fuchsiacine, and those other beautiful varieties of colour which are produced by our dyers in silk, wool or cotton.

When a lady arrays herself in a fine example of our silk manufacture, in either of these colours, she cannot but feel she is indebted for a new pleasure to the science that produced it. We never possessed any tint in which there was so much depth, or intensity, with so little of that glare which becomes offensively ootrusive. The colours, too, are absolutely new; they are neither the rose, the violet, the peach, nor the blossom, in which our mothers prided, but they are those, with something superadded. The dyed surface has a power peculiarly its own, of separating two or more rays from the source of all colour, LIGHT, and of sending them off in most harmonious combination.

The philosophy of colour may eventually engage our attention, when the causes producing the much-admired tones of the Mauve and Magenta can be elucidated more satisfactorily than we can do now; at present, we are limited to a clear but concise description of the processes by which we have obtained the dyes whose names are taken for the heading of our article.

A piece of wood and a lump of coal have no particular resemblance to each other, but they belong to the same family; they are very near relations. The coal we burn, and which is dug from a thousand feet below the present surface of the earth, with most laborious toil and under circumstances of peculiar hazard to the miner, was once a forest growing in luxuriant beauty, in the splendour of a tropical sun. Myriads of ages have elapsed, mountains have been worn down, and their débris strown over the buried forests. Hundreds of yards, in thickness, of sandstone and shale, have to be pierced ere we reach our buried treasure, more valuable far, than the "hoarded gold" of the enchanter Merlyn. In the deeps, and in the darkness of these rock formations, chemical changes have gone on, resulting in the production of that coal which gives to our country her commercial supremacy, and to our ladies-Mauve and Magenta.

We have to take our coal to the gasworks, and there we subject this natural product to a destructive distillation-as the process is termed; we obtain the gas with which we illuminate our towns and our houses, and the coal yields by the process, at the same time, many other things.

The simplest illustration of gas-making may be obtained by taking a common tobacco-pipe, filling the bowl thereof with powdered coal, and covering it with a piece of clay. If we place the bowl of the pipe inverted in the fire, we shall find, as it becomes red hot, that, first, a liquid will distil over through the stem-this is the fluid product and as the heat is increased we have a gaseous body, which will take fire, and burn steadily, on the application of flame. Precisely the same process goes on in our tobacco-pipe as occurs in the open fire, with one very important exception -the products are not allowed to combine with the oxygen of the air. By heat we decompose the coal: the elements thus separated re-combine among themselves; and thus it has been proved that we can obtain—

Seven solid products; Nine gaseous compounds; Six acid substances; Eleven bases, or compounds capable of uniting with acids; and no less than Fourteen neutral bodies, many of them of a very remarkable character.

Coal is, chemically, a compound of carbon with hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen; and it is by the interchange of these four elementary bodies, in varying proportions, that the forty-seven bodies are obtained.

Among the eleven bases is a substance named Aniline; and as from this body all the colours of which we have to speak are procured, it merits an especial description.

Formerly, at our gasworks, everything was regarded as a waste.product except the illuminating gas-CARBURETTED HYDROGEN. The coal tar was, it is true, collected and used, but it was regarded, from its disagreeable smell, as a very unpleasant neighbour. The chemist has, however, taken this coal tar, so offensive to our sense of smell, and he has extracted from it several essences remarkable for their fragrance; and again, from the same black tar—to touch which was to be defiled-by a process of transmutation, the chemist has evoked a colour which has carried joy to the hearts of the Cardinals of Rome, and administered much pleasure to the Fashion rulers of our own and other lands.

Aniline, we have said, is one of the products obtained from coal tar. This substance derives its name from Anil, the name of one of the plants producing Indigo, as from this colouring matter Aniline was first separated. From Indigo-blue this Aniline can be obtained by treating it with potash, and then distilling the mass; but Hofmann discovered a far more abundant source of it in the oil of gas tar. It would be tedious, and, after all, not very intelligible, to describe the processes, but the result of many careful distillations, is a brown oil; this, by purification, becomes a colourless liquid, possessing a peculiar aromatic odour. This is the important Aniline, a chemical compound, consisting of twelve proportions of carbon, seven of hydrogen, and one of nitrogen.

This interesting substance combines with acids to form crystalline salts; its combination with oil of vitriol (sulphuric acid) forms sulphate of Aniline, which is the most important. These crystals, which are beautiful colourless plates of a silvery lustre, become red by exposure to the air; and here is

developed the secret of its producing the exquisite reds and purples of which we write.

By adding oxygen to, that is, by oxidizing this salt of Aniline, the red or purple colour is obtained, and as we vary the agent imparting the oxygen, so we have the means of varying the dye, and may secure any of the shades, between the blues and the reds, which are met with in the shops.

As we have stated, Mr. Perkins was the discoverer of the original Mauve. He was a student of Dr. Ilofmann's, and employed by that chemist to assist him in his investigations of the products from coal. The preparation of Aniline was described by Dr. Hofmann, and he first showed that its presence could be detected by the violet colour it gave when treated with chlorine. This was the key to everything that has since been done, and it is not a litle curious to see how the changes have been rung by the chemists on oxidizing agents. A few examples will suffice:--

Salt of Aniline, with Bichromate of Potash... Mauve, and Perkins' Purple. Bichloride of Mercury... Magenta, and other Reds.

Ditto

This list might be considerably extended if there were any reason for so doing. Our purpose is answered if we have sufficiently explained the sources from which are now procured this class of charming colours, before which the boasted Tyrian, or Imperial Purple, must pale. The colour obtained from the shell-fish does not appear to have been a permanent colour; though costly, it was evanescent. The Mauve and Magenta are permanent colours. Light does not bleach them; the weaker acids do not stain them; the colour is dependent on the oxidation of the base of it, whereas, in nearly all other colours, the action of oxygen is to destroy the colour.

The power of chemistry is exemplified in this discovery, and through it, physical science teaches us a remarkable truth.

Aniline is formed in the Indigofero Anil, or Indigo Plant, in the process of vegetation; and we find Aniline existing in the coal that has been buried myriads of ages, deep in our solid rock formations.

Every organized form is the result of the action of the solar rays. The woody structure of a plant is only formed under the influence of Light, and for every equivalent of sunshine an equivalent of wood is formed. So of the vegetable juices, and so of vegetable colours. In Nature's arcana the Great Alchemist changes Light into Colour, and from the Imponderable Powers, material forms are created, the quantity being always in exact proportion to the amount of solar influence brought into action on matter.

We may perhaps be able to render this intelligible to the unscientific reader, by taking an example from another department of science. Elec