faithful recollection, a warm imagination, and a too fond heart. The lines beginning "Thou lingering star with less'ning ray," are, or ought to be, too familiar to every reader of taste and sensibility to need repetition here, as well as those to Highland Mary, equally expressive of ardent and poetical feeling, a feeling which all the rough usages of the world were unable to deprive of its tenderness, and which all the allurements of vice and folly were unable to divest of its purity. In glancing over the pages of this genuine bard of nature, we are every moment struck with the peculiar pathos with which he speaks of love. Read as an instance the following lines, so unlike anything that we meet with in the productions of the present day. "Had we never lov'd sae blindly, "We had ne'er been broken-hearted. "Fare thee weel, thou first and fairest ! "Peace, enjoyment, love, and pleasure! 1 Or, "Ae fond kiss, and then we sever; "Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee, "Not the bee upon the blossom, "In the pride o' sunny noon; "Not the little sporting fairy, "All beneath the summer moon! "Not the poet, in the moment "Kens the pleasure, feels the rapture, Or again, "Altho' thou maun never be mine, "Altho' even hope is denied ; ""Tis sweeter for thee despairing, "Than aught in the world beside." And where in the records of feeling can we find a more affecting description of love and poverty contending against each other, than in the following song; the first and last stanzas of which I shall quote for the benefit of those who are too wise to think of love, who are too happy to have ever been compelled to take poverty into their calculations, and who are consequently unacquainted with the fact that both together struggling for mastery over the wishes and the will, create a warfare as fearful and desolating as any which the human heart is capable of enduring. "O Poortith cauld, and restless love, "Ye wreck my peace between ye; "An 'twere na for my Jeanie. "How blest the humble cotter's fate! "He wooes his simple dearie; Moore has done much, perhaps more than any other man was capable of doing, to render this hackneyed theme agreeable to modern. tastes, by arraying the idol whose divinity the public had begun to question, in every kind of drapery, graceful and gorgeous, and placing it in every possible variety of light and shadow. Yet throughout the many elegant lines which he has devoted to this subject, there are none which VOL. II. occur to my recollection more poetically simple and touching than these. "A boat sent forth to sail alone "Are like what I am without thee." In the pages of Shelley we find more freshness, and sometimes more pathos. There is a vividness in his thoughts, and in the character of his mind, which we may well believe to have proved too keen and restless for the mortal frame in which his delicate, sensitive, and ethereal spirit was inclosed-too refined for the common purposes of life, too brilliant for reason, too dazzling for religion, and too exquisite for repose. The following lines have great poetical beauty. "Ah! fleeter far than fleetest storm or steed, "Or the death they bear, "The heart which tender thought clothes like a dove "With the wings of care; "In the battle, in the darkness, in the need, "Shall mine cling to thee, "Nor claim one smile for all the comfort, love, "It may bring to thee." And the following fragment, addressed to love itself, with the exception of the first line, which is in extremely bad taste, is perhaps without its equal in poetry of this description. "Thou art the wine whose drunkenness is all "Catch thee and feed from their o'erflowing bowls "Investest it; and when the heavens are blue "Thou fillest them; and when the earth is fair "The shadow of thy moving wings imbue "Its desarts, and its mountains, till they wear 66 66 Beauty like some bright robe ;-thou ever soarest "In spring, which moves the unawakened forest, Clothing with leaves its branches bare and bleak, "Thou floatest among men; and aye implorest 66 That which from thee they should implore :-the weak "Alone kneel to thee, offering up the hearts "The strong have broken-yet where shall any seek From love, as a passion, it is truly delightful to turn to the consideration of love in its more social and domestic character; and here again we find the same poet offering to his wife the noblest tribute of affection, in language as tender as it is elevated and pure. |