Him Venus loved—­Love’s cherished creatures they! 
And Venus wooed with perseverance sore,
Till weary was the lad, the wooing o’er;
And while he, hiding in the forest lay,
O’ershaded from the sun’s unfriendly ray,
Ah me! there came to kill a maddened, foaming boar!

Oh! see! from limbs too fair for touch of earth,
As tusk and tusk is savage through them drove,
While rain their dainty power ’fending strove,
The pure red liquid life all wasting forth! 
All wasted, lost?  Nay! thence, thence took its birth
ADONIUM, eternal bloom of martyred Love!

Love’s martyr is a-bleeding now again;
Sweet Liberty, beloved of earth, doth bleed: 
The maddened, foaming boar hath come indeed,
And tears our life on many a gory plain;
But we—­as bled the boy—­bleed not in vain: 
Our blood-drops—­our sons—­will be Adonium seed!

Who die for Liberty—­they never die! 
Adonis, dead for Love, doth live anew! 
They bloom blood-flowers in the tearful dew,
Forever falling on their memory! 
In veins that are and veins that are not to be,
They ever coursing live, the right, the good, the true!

Where sinks the martyr’s blood within the sod,
A spirit-plant of universal root,
Divinely radiant, doth upward shoot,
Appealing from a wicked world to God! 
And seen for once, down drops the tyrant’s rod;
For men at last have tasted of a heavenly fruit.

All good and beautiful of soul thus sprung
From blood, e’en as the Adonium I sing;
And where the blood is purest, thence doth spring
Such flowers as by heavenly bards are sung;
For since from Christ the fierce blood-sweat was wrung,
Have growths of nobler fruit on earth been ripening!

POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTES.

There is positively no class of writers entitled to higher praise, or actuated by nobler motives, than those who are now distinguishing themselves by their labors for Education.  They have laid their hands on what is to be the great social motive power of the future—­the great subject of the politics of days to come—­and are working bravely in the sacred cause.

Yet it can hardly be denied that amid the vast mass of every practical observation and suggestion contained in the educational works with which we are familiar, or even among the really scientific contributors to it, there is very little founded on the great social wants and tendencies of the age.  Education is, at present, merely an art; it has a right, in common with every conceivable department of knowledge, to be raised to the rank of a science.  This can only be done by putting it on a progressive basis, and placing it in such a position as to aid in supplying some great demand of the age.