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soned,' and 'its dregs are wormwood;' will of course pass through his three-score years and ten,'

'Young, yet enervate; old, yet never wise;'

will of course live in cheerless isolation, and die with a muttered curse upon his lips.

But listen to another verse from the Book of Lamentations :'

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'OUR life is a false nature; 't is not in

The harmony of things-this hard decree,

This uneradicable taint of sin,

This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree,

Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be
The skies, that rain their plagues on men like dew-
Disease, death, bondage, all the woes we see-

And worse, the woes we see not, which throb through
The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new.'

Enough! enough! Fold, oh fold thy dusky wing, and hush thy dismal chant, dark bird of affliction! Wave thy gloomy form no more before my aching eyeballs! Let thy note of anguish pierce no longer the cavern of my sickening ear! Does sorrow come too slowly of itself? Even in the path of virtue, are not our affections often wounded, our spirits dimmed, our peace impaired? Do not the progressive changes of our nature darken sufficiently of themselves the glory of the world without, and wither the freshness of the heart within? While we are weeping for the past, dost thou tell us, oh bird of evil omen! that there is no joy to come? Why does thy figure flit gloomy and spectral through the twilight of feeling, and scream a new and more dolorous death-dirge in the ears of the soul, that even now sits desolate and mourning in her dreary halls? We sigh for refreshment, and thou breakest down the last poor remnant of our faint and failing strength: we call for nuptial dances and the festal song, striving to win oblivion of the Past by watching the sweet rainbow that springs softly glittering from our very tears, and thou harrowest our stricken spirits with a requiem over the grave of Hope!

As for Don Juan,' its fate is certain. Such a Gothic structure can hardly be expected to reach a good old age. I grant, as willingly as the most willing, that it by turns displays almost every kind of genius, and that in its highest perfection. Grandeur, force, novelty, compass, wit, harmony, pathos appear on the stage in their most beautiful and striking forms. But many passages are stupidly impious, and shamefully indecent, and large segments are to all tastes the dullest of trash; the drivellings of a muse maudlin on the dregs of a noble vintage. And in general, so incongruous a mass, con

structive with conflicting designs, and raising its miscreated front in defiance of heaven and earth, must be of brief duration. Splendid falsehood, whether in matters of taste, or government, or morals, will at last be discovered; and when the sandiness of the foundation is perceived, the magnificence of the building, and the genius of the builder, are both likely to fall into indifference or contempt. At various periods of the world's history have bright erratic geniuses shot like meteors athwart its intellectual sky, who, had they been confined in their proper orbits, might have shed a lasting lustre on succeeding ages. But men will not long be guided by those who cannot guide themselves. Rousseau, the sensitive egotist and passionate dreamer, who took so strange a pride in half-disclosing to the world the black and poisonous ulcers of his heart, and who excited in all ill-balanced minds an interest so deep, so earnest, so admiring, has quietly slipped from the nooks of memory, and whatever may be his sentence, when he shall appear, as he impiously says, with his 'Confessions' in his hand before the tribunal of his Maker, both he and his book have already been condemned by the verdict of his fellow-mortals. And Byron, who was another Rousseau, but of still loftier genius and of yet wilder phrensy, lived the same wretched, self-destroying life, and will meet the same speedy and inglorious end. For the time I trust will come when men would as soon infuriate their blood with the poison of adders as fire their spirits with that 'wine of devils,' the poetry of unholy passion. At all events, a century from now the echoes will no longer be vocal with the name of Byron, and all that the multitude will know of his wild outpourings will be some imperishable portions of his larger works, and a few of those minor poems, which in their peculiar walk have neither peer nor rival.

I had intended, after canvassing according to my light the poetry of Wordsworth and Byron, to examine somewhat in detail the productions of their English contemporaries. But 'the play is hardly worth the candle.' As for Crabbe, Rogers, Lamb, Heber, White, and Montgomery, some of them are feeble poets, and all of them I consider as members of the good old English school. Scott could write respectable semi-epics and spirited ballads; that was all. Moore can compose most luscious and melodious songs that is all. Some may think that Mrs. Hemans' poems constitute a distinctive and very exalted school of poetry. I hope I shall not offend young ladies in boarding-schools, or young gentlemen of an excessive quantity of feeble feeling, if I remark that she appears to me (barring the immorality) to be a sort of circumscribed and diluted Byron, and that except to such persons as can feed all day on Ossian, her poetry after a half-hour's reading grows monotonous and tiresome to the last degree. I shall not deny that some score or more among her smaller poems, known to every body by heart, are of original and exceeding beauty, and not devoid of energy and health. But the rest of her productions, many of them quite superior by themselves, are mostly repetition, repetition, repetition; a rifacciamento of the same superfluous epithets, and ideas of the same

family likeness. They are impregnated with a strong and uniform mannerism, and all bear the same unmistakeable image and superscription.' She was excessively fond of subjects generally considered by sentimentalists as highly romantic; such as knights with black plumes, war-worn crusaders, etc. There is little contrast in her poems, and their variety is like that of a paper of pins, a variety in numbers, not in kind. I once read her poems throughout. I would not do it again for love or money.' I became absolutely sick of the unvarying beauty of the world; for over it all flowed the same balmy breath, and floated the same rosy glow. She possessed great sensibility, and great facility of rhyme; but as her intellect was not powerful, her fecundity was her bane. Joanna Baillie had assuredly far more of poetical capacity.

In all the foregoing remarks, I must not of course be understood as denying that many English poets of the nineteenth century (some of them just rising on our view) are deserving of great gratitude and admiration; but merely as upholding the claims of their predecessors to deeper reverence and longer study.

Having wearied myself, and probably my readers, and certainly OLD KNICK., who does not like long articles, I would here pause, but for some thoughts that rise of themselves in considering the career of such great bad men as Rousseau and Byron, and the deadly influence they shed on the minds and lives of their admirers. To a fine sensitive young mind, which has just reached the turning-point of life, when intoxicating thoughts rush in upon it like a flood, and Poetry spreads forth her magical and bright creation, some words of counsel might be addressed. Be heedful of your steps! I warn you, you are treading on dangerous ground; per ignes suppositos cineri doloso.' You are walking over a soil beneath whose shallow incrustation rolls the burning lava, and ignite the sulphurous vapors of volcanic passion. And know you that many a hapless Empedocles lies imbedded in those smouldering depths; that many a noble spirit has been scorched, and blackened, and petrified for ever by the smoke and cinders of that fiery furnace; or overtaken and surrounded, like a buried city, by the 'devilish glut' that boils from its infernal craters? Are these figures extravagant? Would GOD they were! Would GOD they could faintly image that moral ruin, which might draw tears, such as angels weep!' For is it not a fact, that many a being of stateliest growth, formed for the pride and shelter of his race, has been blown upon by winds from the desert of blasted hearts, till he has stood like a scathed oak, its glory withered? Were not one-third of Heaven's angelic brotherhood flung from eternal splendors,' following the Morning Star' in his contagious fall? And are not our Morning Stars, whether fixed or fallen, omnipotent for evil as for good?

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Alas! in my own narrow walk have I not seen high, bold beings led by the Satanic Muse' along the downward way? Was I not familiar, like a brother, with a bright and beauteous youth, whose god was Byron; who purposely chained his clear intellect to the wheels of an impulsive, burning spirit, because he was resolved to

be a hero; who suppressed his healthful feelings, and burst from the ties of natural affection, wishing to make each day a chapter of passionate romance; who left friends and kindred to roam through foreign lands in quest of wild adventure; who returned, worn and wretched, only to feel in bitterness the late remorse of love;' for she, his own fond mother, was sleeping in the wormy bed,' and now no tears of contrition nor deeds of amendment could soothe her poor crushed heart; and who, in fine, died in the morning of his life, almost a maniac in utter desolation? We, who have attained to safer years, may sometimes pause to admire the glory and lament the gloom of an intellect like Byron's. But while we weep by the grave of suicidal genius, and gaze in speechless sorrow on the wreck of mind, let us keep the young and the ardent aloof from their maddening influence. Though dead, they yet speak.' Their spirits still live, and exert a power of evil eloquence on men, more blighting than the pestilence that walketh in darkness, or the destruction that wasteth at noon-day.'

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WE MEET IN DREAMS.

We are such stuff as dreams are made of,
And our little life is rounded with a sleep.'

THOU Com'st to me in dreams, beloved! thou com'st to me in dreams;
A vision of the solemn night, that o'er my spirit gleams;

I think not of thy quiet sleep, thy calm unbroken rest,

For my hand is clasped within thine own, my lip to thine is pressed;
And softly to my dreaming ear thy voice comes sweet and low;
Alas! for all the weary months, since last I heard its flow!

We meet as we in life had met; I feel thy warm caress,

And thine eye hath still the same deep gaze of thoughtful tenderness;
And we speak the same fond words again, of love and hope and trust,
And I forget my path of tears, and thy low bed of dust;
Forget the wreck that Death has made, the hour that bade us sever,
And deem thou com'st in life and love, mine own again, for ever!

Thou com'st to me in earthly guise, as thou wert wont to come,
When thy smiles brought gladness to my heart and sunshine to my home:
And joyfully I greet thy smiles, thine eye's pure light I see,

But oh! beloved, in heavenly robes come yet in dreams to me!
Come! for my yearning soul would know of that far world of bliss,
Would question if its holy joys quell every thought of this;
Would know the form thy spirit wears in those pure courts above,
And learn the language of the skies, breathed from thy lips of love.

Would question of thy high employ, before the eternal throne —
Oh! in thy robes of glorious light, come! come to me, mine own!
Tell me if we shall meet in joy, when my brief race is o'er,
And hand in hand on angel wings the fields of light explore;
And whisper if a love like ours, in that celestial air,

Shall live with newer, holier powers, unchanged, unchanging there!

MY UNCLE, THE PARSON.

NUMBER THREE.

ALL are not men, that wear the form of Man;
Nor all are Dinners, that are Dinners call'd!
"Tis not the throng of liveried attendants;
"Tis not the glare of glass; the pomp of plate;
The lustre of a thousand lamps of gold;
Nor cumbrous garniture of jellied meats

That pass untouch'd from banquet unto banquet,
Filling the Eye perchance but not the mouth;
Nor all the feasts of HELIOGABULUS
Without a virtuous welcome from the host;
Far less the long array of solemn heads,
With brows all Čain-like with unholy thrift,
That, dinners having given, would dinner take-
O no, my heart! not such, not such the fruit
Wherewith to form that recreation of the Soul;
That interchange of beautiful communion;
That joy of bright Olympus! chosen by the Gods
To charm and to divide the golden hours
And make after mid-day a second morn of Hope!
That Violet passage on the wing of Time
The Wise, with earnestness, a dinner-call!

OLD ALBUM.

THAT Violet passage on the wing of Time,' as the didactick old authour above cited well calls it, if as I suppose he means the dinner-hour, now reached the nicely-sanded parlour at the Inn of good Mistress Roach in the then village of Ipswich. The door opened; and there were ushered into the apartment, the antecedents and partakers of the coming repast, two individuals of grave and respectable appearance; one a thickset man of middle age, and the other a more youthful, and much taller, stouter, larger person, than his companion.

Men

They were two of a class that forms the pride of New-England; and that might well be the boast of any country on the Earth. of order, and of truth; men of purpose, men of intelligence, men of action; yeomen of Massachusetts; freeholders of that stern and rugged, but surely not unpropitious soil-if health and strength of body; if tranquil and condensed, yet irrepressible energy of mind, which is with them the almost invariable concomitant of physical force and laborious exertion, can in any degree be considered as tendencies of climate or of nurture.

They had uncased themselves out of the long blue-striped homespun frock that when upon the road had covered each from neck to ancle, and having made free use of the pump at which their cattle also had been refreshed, came into the parlour with the hair around the brows and cheeks still wet with the vigorous ablution they had undergone. They entered like proprietors; and would have had the same bearing if the Inn had been the palace of the Cæsars; and yet there was nothing in their manner either rude, or obtrusive. Calm, hard-featured, swart, athletic men, they reminded me as I rose to accost them,' said my Uncle the parson, ' of Ajax the Less, and Ajax Telamon,'

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