able character, he needs only to be a man of common honesty, well advised.

There is nothing meritorious but virtue and friendship; and indeed friendship itself is but a part of virtue.

FROM LAVATER.

He who is open, without levity; generous, without waste; secret, without craft; humble, without meanness; cautious, without anxiety; regular, yet not formal; mild, yet not timid; firm, yet not tyrannical: is made to pass the ordeal of honour, friendship, virtue.

He who begins with severity in judging of another, ends commonly with falsehood.

A sneer is often the sign of heartless malignity.

There is a manner of forgiving so divine, that you are ready to embrace the offender for having called it forth.

He who is master of the fittest moment to crush his enemy, and magnanimously neglects it, is born to be a conqueror.

Everything may be mimicked by hypocrisy, but humility and love united. The humblest star twinkles most in the darkest night. The more rare humility and love unite, the more radiant when they meet.

The wrath that on conviction subsides into mildness, is the wrath of a generous mind.

If you ask me which is the real hereditary sin of human nature, do you imagine I shall answer pride, or luxury, or ambition, or egotism? No; I shall say indolence: who conquers indolence will conquer all the rest.

Avoid the eye that discovers with rapidity the bad, and is slow to see the good.

Sagacity in selecting the good, and courage to honour it, according to its degree, determines your own degree of goodness.

Who cuts is easily wounded. The readier you are to offend, the sooner you are offended.

He who is respectable when thinking himself alone and free from observation, will be so before the eye of all the world.

The manner of giving shows the character of the giver more than the gift itself: there is a princely manner of giving and a royal manner of accepting.

He who affects useless singularity, has a little mind.

The more honesty a man has, the less he affects the air of a saint: the affectation of sanctity is a blotch on the face of piety.

The wrangler, the puzzler, the word-hunter, are incapable of great actions.

Who, at the relation of some unmerited misfortune smiles, is either a fool, a fiend, or a villain.

Know, that the great art to love your enemy consists in never losing sight of man in him: humanity has power over all that is human; the most inhuman man still remains man, and never can throw off all taste for what belongs to man-but you must learn to wait.

The most abhorred thing in nature is the face that smiles abroad, and flashes fury when it returns to the lap of a tender, helpless family. Between passion and lie there is not a finger's breadth.

Then talk of patience, when you have borne him who has none, without repining.

Trust not him with your secrets, who, when left alone in your room, turns over your papers.

It is possible that a wise and good man may be prevailed on to game; but it is impossible that a professed gamester should be a wise and great man.

He who believes not in virtue, must be vicious; all faith is only the reminiscence of the good that once arose and the omen of the good that may arise within us.

If you mean to know yourself, interline such of these aphorisms as affected you, and set a mark to such as left a sense of uneasiness with you, and then show your copy to whom you please.

PLEASURES OF PROMISE.

Things may be well to seem that are not well to be,
And thus bath fancy's dream been realized to me.
We deem the distant tide a blue and solid ground;
We seek the green hill's side, and thorns are only found.

Is hope then ever so?-or is it as a tree,
Whereon fresh blossoms grow, for those that faded be?
Oh, who may think to sail from peril and from snare,
When rocks beneath us fail, and bolts are in the air?

Yet hope the storm can quell with a soft and happy tune,

Or hang December's cell with figures caught from June:
And even unto me there cometh, less forlorn,
An impulse from the sea, a promise from the morn.

When summer shadows break, and gentle winds rejoice,
On mountain or on lake ascends a constant voice
With a hope and with a pride, its music woke of old,
And every pulse replied in tales as fondly told.

Though illusion aids no more the poetry of youth,
Its fabled sweetness o'er, it leaves a pensive truth :-
That tears the sight obscure, that sounds the ear betray,
That nothing can allure the heart to go astray.

S. LAMAN BLANCHARD,

THE VISION OF THE MAID OF

ORLEANS.1

[Robert Southey, LL.D., born at Bristol, 2th August, 1774; died at Keswick, Cumberland, 21st March, 1843. Poet, historian, biographer, and miscellaneous writer. For some time he was uncertain what profession to adopt: his friends advised the church; he flirted with law, and at length devoted himself to literature. In 1807 he received a pension of £144 a year for literary services; in 1813 he was appointed poet laureate; in 1835 he was placed on the civil list for £300 a year, and Sir Robert Peel offered him a baronetcy, which he declined. Of his numerous works we may mention, amongst his poems: Joan of Arc; Thalaba the Destroyer; Madoc: Metrical Tales and other Poems; Roderick, the Last of the Goths; Wat Tyler; The Curse of Kehama; The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo, &c. Amongst his prose writings-The Life of Nelson-which Macaulay said was, "beyond all doubt, the most perfect of his works"-Life of John Wesley: History of the Peninsular War: Lives of Uneducated Poets; Essays, Moral and Political, &c. In his Poetic Literature, D. M. Moir observed: "Southey shone in the paths of gentle meditation and philosophic reflection; but his chief strength lay in description, where he had few equals. capacious mind may be likened to a variegated continent, one region of which is damp with fogs, rough with rocks, barren and unprofitable; the other bright with glorious sunshine, valleys of rich luxuriance, and forests of perpetual verdure." Joan of Arc was his first publication of any importance, and appeared in 1795. In his later years the poet carefully revised the poem for the complete edition of his works published by Longmans and Co. The Maid of Orleans-so-called on account of her heroic defence of that city-was born in the hamlet of Domremy, near the Meuse, in 1410 or 1411, and her marvellous career closed in May, 1431, in the market-place of Rouen, where she was burned as a sorceress. Southey in his preface to the poem wrote: "That she believed herself inspired, few will deny; that she was inspired, few will venture to assert; and it is difficult to believe that she was herself imposed upon by Charles and Dunois. That she discovered the king when he disguised himself, among the courtiers, to deceive her, and that, as a proof of her mission, she demanded a sword from the tomb of St. Catherine, are facts in which

His

all historians agree.... The Maid was not knowingly an impostor."]

Instructing best the passive faculty;
Or that the soul, escaped its fleshly clog,
Flies free, and soars amid the invisible world,
And all things are that seem.

Along a moor,

Barren, and wide, and drear, and demolate,
She roam'd, a wanderer through the cheerless night.
Far through the silence of the unbroken plain
The bittern's boom was heard; hoarse, heavy, deep,
It made accordant music to the scene.

Black clouds, driven fast before the stormy wind,
Swept shadowing: through their broken folds the moon
Struggled at times with transitory ray,
And made the moving darkness visible.
And now arrived beside a fenny lake

She stands, amid whose stagnate waters, hoarse
The long reeds rustled to the gale of night.
A time-worn bark receives the maid, impell'd
By powers unseen; then did the moon display
Where through the crazy vessel's yawning side
The muddy waters oozed. A woman guides,
And spreads the sail before the wind, which moan'd
As melancholy mournful to her ear,
As ever by a dungeon'd wretch was heard
Howling at evening round his prison towers.
Wan was the pilot's countenance, her eyes
Hollow, and her sunk cheeks were furrow'd deep,
Channell'd by tears! a few gray locks hung down
Beneath her hood: and through the maiden's veins
Chill crept the blood, when, as the night-breeze pass'd,
Lifting her tatter'd mantle, coil'd around
She saw a serpent gnawing at her heart.

The plumeless bats with short shrill note flit by, And the night-raven's scream came fitfully, Borne on the hollow blast. Eager the Maid Look'd to the shore, and now upon the bank Leapt, joyful to escape, yet trembling still In recollection.

There, a mouldering pile Stretch'd its wide ruins, o'er the plain below Casting a gloomy shade, save where the moon Shone through its fretted windows: the dark yew, Withering with age, branch'd there its naked roots, And there the melancholy cypress rear'd

Its head; the earth was heaved with many a mound, And here and there a half-demolish'd tomb.

And now, amid the ruin's darkest shade, The virgin's eye beheld where pale blue flames Rose wavering, now just gleaming from the earth, And now in darkness drown'd. An aged man Sate near, seated on what in long-past days Had been some sculptured monument, now fallen And half-obscured by moss, and gather'd heaps Of wither'd yew-leaves and earth-mouldering bones. His eye was large and rayless, and fix'd full Upon the maid; the tomb-fires on his face Shed a blue light; his face was of the hue Of death; his limbs were mantled in a shroud, Then with a deep heart-terrifying voice,

Exclaim'd the spectre, "Welcome to these realms,
These regions of despair, O thou whose steps
Sorrow hath guided to my sad abodes!
Welcome to my drear empire, to this gloom
Eternal, to this everlasting night,

Where never morning darts the enlivening ray,
Where never shines the sun, but all is dark,
Dark as the bosom of their gloomy king."

So saying, he arose, and drawing on,
Her to the abbey's inner ruin led,

Resisting not his guidance. Through the roof
Once fretted and emblazed, but broken now
In part, elsewhere all open to the sky,
The moonbeams enter'd, chequer'd here, and here
With unimpeded light. The ivy twined
Round the dismantled columns; imaged forms
Of saints and warlike chiefs, moss canker'd now
And mutilate, lay strewn upon the ground,
With crumbled fragments, crucifixes fallen,
And rusted trophies. Meantime overhead

Roar'd the loud blast, and from the tower the owl
Scream'd as the tempest shook her secret nest.
He, silent, led her on, and often paused,
And pointed, that her eye might contemplate
At leisure the drear scene.

He dragg'd her on
Through a low iron door, down broken stairs;
Then a cold horror through the maiden's frame
Crept, for she stood amid a vault, and saw,
By the sepulchral lamp's dim glaring light,
The fragments of the dead.

Is no return. Gaze here; behold this skull,
These eyeless sockets, and these unflesh'd jaws,
That with their ghastly grinning seem to mock
Thy perishable charms; for thus thy cheek

Must moulder. Child of grief! shrinks not thy soul,
Viewing these horrors? trembles not thy heart
At the dread thought that here its life's blood soon
Shall stagnate, and the finely-fibred frame,
Now warm in life and feeling, mingle soon
With the cold clod? thing horrible to think, . . .
Yet in thought only, for reality

Is none of suffering here; here all is peace;
No nerve will throb to anguish in the grave.
Dreadful it is to think of losing life,
But having lost, knowledge of loss is not,
Therefore no ill. Oh, wherefore then delay
To end all ills at once!"

So spake Despair.
The vaulted roof echoed his hollow voice,
And all again was silence. Quick her heart
Panted. He placed a dagger in her hand,
And cried again, "Oh wherefore then delay!
One blow, and rest for ever!" On the fiend
Dark scowl'd the virgin with indignant eye,
And threw the dagger down. He next his heart

Replaced the murderous steel, and drew the maid Along the downward vault.

The damp earth gave

A dim sound as they pass'd: the tainted air
Was cold, and heavy with unwholesome dews.
"Behold!" the fiend exclaim'd, "how loathsomely
The fleshly remnant of mortality

Moulders to clay!" then fixing his broad eye
Full on her face, he pointed where a corpse

Lay livid; she beheld with horrent look,

The spectacle abhorr d by living man.

"Look here!" Despair pursued, "this loathsome mass Was once as lovely, and as full of life

As, damsel, thou art now. Those deep-sunk eyes
Once beam'd the mild light of intelligence,
And where thou seest the pamper'd flesh-worm trail,
Once the white bosom heaved. She fondly thought
That at the hallow'd altar, soon the priest
Should bless her coming union, and the torch
Its joyful lustre o'er the hall of joy,
Cast on her nuptial evening: earth to earth
That priest consign'd her, for her lover went
By glory lured to war, and perish'd there;
Nor she endured to live. Ha! fades thy cheek?
Dost thou then, maiden, tremble at the tale?
Look here! behold the youthful paramour!
The self-devoted hero!"

Fearfully

The maid look'd down, and saw the well-known face
Of Theodore. In thoughts unspeakable,
Convulsed with horror, o'er her face she clasp'd
Her cold damp hands: "Shrink not," the phantom
cried,

"Gaze on!" and unrelentingly he grasp'd

Her quivering arm: "this lifeless mouldering clay,
As well thou know'st, was warn with all the glow
Of youth and love; this is the hand that cleft
Proud Salisbury's crest, now motionless in death,
Unable to protect the ravaged frame
From the foul offspring of mortality
That feed on heroes. Though long years were thine
Yet never more would life reanimate

This slanghter'd youth; slaughter'd for thee! for thou
Didst lead him to the battle from his home,
Where else he had survived to good old age:
In thy defence he died: strike then! destroy
Remorse with life."