Stern lawgiver! yet thou dost wear Flowers laugh before thee on their beds; To humbler functions, awful power! The confidence of reason give ; And in the light of truth thy bondman let me live SONNET TO MILTON. MILTON, thou shouldst be living at this hour: And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea; ODE ON THE INTIMATIONS OF IMMOR- THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The glory and the freshness of a dream. By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more! The rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the rose,— The moon doth with delight Look around her when the heavens are bare ; Are beautiful and fair; The sunshine is a glorious birth; But yet I know, where'er I go, That there hath passed away a glory from the earth. Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song, To me alone there came a thought of grief : The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep,- It must be borne in mind that what is here given is only an extract from the Ode. And all the earth is gay; Give themselves up to jollity, And with the heart of May Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy shepherd boy! Ye blessed creatures, I have heard the call The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee ; My head hath its coronal, The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all. And the children are pulling, On every side, In a thousand valleys far and wide, -But there's a tree, of many one, Doth the same tale repeat: Whither is fled the visionary gleam? And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come Heaven lies about us in our infancy! But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, The youth, who daily farther from the east Ìs on his way attended; At length the man perceives it die away, SIR WALTER SCOTT. (1771-1832.) BORN in Edinburgh. Educated for the law, and called to the bar in 1792, but soon afterwards devoted himself almost exclusively to literature. Scott's first great work (The Lay of the Last Minstrel) met with immediate and great success; and the pecuniary results of his subsequent literary efforts were such as enabled him to make Abbotsford a residence worthy of a Scotch laird. He entered into partnership with the printing firm of Ballantyne & Co., which became bankrupt in 1825, with debts amounting to considerably more than 100,000, for the whole of which Scott was liable. When fifty-five years old, he set to work vigorously to clear off, by his pen, this immense debt, and very materially diminished it during the remaining five or six years of his life. It was afterwards completely liquidated by the profits on the sale of his works. In the midst of toil and anxiety, Scott was struck with paralysis (1830), and in the hope of deriving benefit from a change of scene, he spent some months of 1831 in Italy. On his way home paralysis again struck him. His earnest wish now was to die, surrounded by his children, at his beloved Abbotsford. This wish was realized on the 21st of September, 1832, and five days later his body was reposing by the side of his wife's in Dryburgh Abbey. Scott's works are very numerous. His chief poems are The Lay of the Last Minstrel; Marmion; The Lady of the Lake. His most celebrated prose works are Waverley; Guy Mannering; The Antiquary; The Heart of Midlothian; Old Mortality ; Ivanhoe; Kenilworth; Peveril of the Peak; Tales of a Grandfather: Life of Napoleon; etc. THE LOVE OF COUNTRY. BREATHES there the man with soul so dead, O CALEDONIA! stern and wild, Land of brown heath and shaggy wood, That knits me to thy rugged strand? Think what is now, and what hath been, Seems as to me of all bereft, Sole friends thy woods and streams were left; Even in extremity of ill. |