her time. But she has moments of extraordinary fire and audacity, when her verse throws off its languor, and progresses with harmony and passion. Her one long poem, The Voyage to the Isle of Love, which extends to more than two thousand lines, is a sentimental allegory, in a vague and tawdry style, almost wholly without value; her best pieces occur here and there in her plays and among her miscellaneous poems. It is very unfortunate that one who is certainly to be numbered, as far as intellectual capacity goes, in the first rank of English female writers, should have done her best to remove her name from the recollection of posterity by the indelicacy and indiscretion of her language. EDMUND W, GOSSE SONG. [From Abdelazar.] Love in fantastic triumph sate, Whilst bleeding hearts around him flowed, For whom fresh pains he did create, And strange tyrannic power he showed; From thy bright eyes he took his fires, Which round about in sport he hurled; But 'twas from mine he took desires Enough to undo the amorous world. From me he took his sighs and tears, And every killing dart from thee; But my poor heart alone is harmed, THE DREAM. The grove was gloomy all around, I slept and saw a piteous sight, Till both his little stars of light Had wept themselves away. Methought I asked him why he cried; My pity led me on,— All sighing the sad boy replied, As I beneath yon myrtles lay, Amyntas stole my bow away, And pinioned both my wings.' 'Alas!' I cried, "twas then thy darts Wherewith he wounded me? Thou mighty deity of hearts, He stole his power from thee? Is, wound Amyntas' cruel heart, His silken fetters I untied, And those gay wings displayed, Which gently fanned, he mounting cried, 'Farewell, fond easy maid!' At this I blushed, and angry grew ON THE DEATH OF WALLER. How to thy sacred memory shall I bring, What inspiration, at the second hand, Eternal as thy own almighty verse, Should be those trophies that adorn thy hearse, To show from whom we hold our right to wit. Long did the untun'd world in ignorance stray, ROCHESTER. [JOHN WILMOT, second Earl of Rochester, was born in 1647, and died July 26, 1680. The best edition of his poems appeared posthumously in 1691.] By a strange and melancholy paradox the finest lyrical poet of the Restoration was also its worst-natured man. Infamous in a lax age for his debaucheries, the Earl of Rochester was unfaithful as a subject, shifting and treacherous as a friend, and untrustworthy as a man of honour. His habitual drunkenness may be taken perhaps as an excuse for the physical cowardice for which he was notorious, and his early decline in bodily strength as the cause of his extreme bitterness of tongue and savage malice. So sullen was his humour, so cruel his pursuit of sensual pleasure, that his figure seems to pass through the social history of his time, like that of a veritable devil. Yet there were points at which the character of this unfortunate and abandoned person was not wholly vile. Within our own age his letters to his wife have surprised the world by their tenderness and quiet domestic humour, and, above all, the finest of his songs reveal a sweetness and purity of feeling for which the legends of his life are very far from preparing us. The volumes which continued to be reprinted for nearly a century under the title of Rochester's Poems form a kind of 'Parnasse Satyrique' into which a modern reader can scarcely venture to dip. Of this notorious collection a large part was spurious; the offensive matter that had to be removed from the writings of Dorset, Buckinghamshire, Butler, and other less famous profligate poets, found an asylum under the infamy of the name of Rochester. But readers who are fortunate enough to secure the volume edited by the dead poet's friends in 1691 will find no more indiscretions than are familiar in all poetry of the Restoration, and will discover, |