tion, and raising of houses and families; to this tendeth buildings, foundations, and monuments; to this tendeth the desire of memory, fame, and celebration, and in effect the strength of all other hu mane desires: we see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power or of the hands. For, have not the verses of Homer continued twentyfive hundred years and more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities, have been decayed and demolished? It is not possible to have the true pictures or statues of Cyrus, Alexander, Cæsar, no, nor of the kings or great personages of much later years. For the originals cannot last and the copies cannot but lose of the life and truth. But the images of men's wits and knowledge remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages. So that, if the invention of the ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits, how much more are letters to be magnified, which, as ships, pass through the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions the one of the other?

JOHN DONNE. 1573-1631.

JOHN DONNE, D. D., though during his life most popular as a poet, is now chiefly valued for his prose writings. He was born in London, in 1573, of Roman Catholic parents, but after completing his studies at Oxford, he embraced Protestantism, and became secretary to lord chancellor Ellesmere. Falling in love with the chancellor's niece, he married her privately, for which he was dismissed from his office, and even imprisoned. He was soon released from his confinement, and having " taken orders," the king (James I.) made him one of his chaplains, at whose request, also, he was presented with the degree of D. D. by the University of Cambridge. Subsequently, he be came preacher of Lincoln's Inn, and received several other church honors, and died March, 1631.

Donne's poems consist of elegies, satires, letters, epigrams, divine poems, and miscellaneous pieces, and procured for him among his contemporaries an extraordinary share of reputation, but now he is almost entirely forgotten. Either extreme does him injustice. Though he has not much harmony of versification, and but little simplicity and naturalness in thought and expres sion, yet he exhibits much erudition, united to an exuberance of wit, and to a fancy, rich, vivid, and picturesque, though, at the same time, it must be confessel, not a little fantastical. Dr. Johnson, in his life of Cowley, considers nin as the founder of the metaphysical school of poets; meaning, thereby, the

faculty of wittily associating the most widely discordant images, and presenting ideas under the most remote and fanciful aspects.

His prose writings consist chiefly of sermons, which, though they have some of the faults of his poetry, are full of rich, condensed, and vigorous thought, and, what is far better, show the author to be an eminently holy man. As a preacher, old Izaak Walton says of him, "he is, in earnest, weeping sometimes for his audience, sometimes with them; always preaching to himself, like an angel from a cloud, but in none; carrying some, as St. Paul was, to heaven, in holy raptures, and enticing others by a sacred art and courtship to amend their lives; here picturing a vice so as to make it ugly to those that practised it; and a virtue so as to make it beloved by those that loved it not; and all this with a most particular grace, and an inexpressible addition of comeliness."1

The following presents a very fair specimen of his poetry: indeed, it is more simple and natural than the greater part of it. The simile of the compasses, whatever may be thought of its beauty or fitness, is certainly original.

THE FAREWELL.

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go;
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
The breath goes now-and some say, no;

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
"Twere profanation of our joys

To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did, and meant:

But trepidation of the spheres,

Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull, sublunary lovers' love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which alimented it.

But we're by love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is;
Inter-assured of the mind,

Careless eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls, therefore, (which are one,)
Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if th' other do.

Read-Johnson's "Life of Cowley" also, an article in the "Retrospective Review," vii'. $1, which gives to his poetry higher praise than we think it deserves; also, some remarks in "Drake's Ahakspeare," i. 615, and above all, Izaak Walton's "Life." A selection from his prose works was ublished at Ox.ord 1840, in one small volume.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,

And grows erect as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circles just,
And makes me end where I begun.

But we turn with more pleasure to his prose :

THE PSALMS.

The Psalms are the manna of the church. As manna tasted to every man like that he liked best, so do the Psalms minister instruction and satisfaction to every man, in every emergency and occasion. David was not only a clear prophet of Christ himself, but a prophet of every particular Christian; he foretells what I, what any shall do, and suffer, and say. And as the whole Book of Psalms is (as the spouse speaks of the name of Christ) an ointment poured out upon all sorts of sores, a cerecloth that supples all bruises, a balm that searches all wounds; so are there some certain Psalms that are imperial Psalms, that command over all affections, and spread themselves over all occasions, catholic, universal Psalms, that apply themselves to all necessities.

ALL CHRISTIANS ARE TO PREACH BY EXAMPLE.

If you be a holy people, you are also a royal priesthood; if you be all God's saints, you are all God's priests; and if you be his priests, it is your office to preach too; as we by words, you by your holy works; as we by contemplation, you by conversation; as we by our doctrine, so you by your lives, are appointed by God to preach to one another: and therefore every particular man must wash his own feet, look that he have speciosos pedes,1 that his example may preach to others, for this is truly a regal priest hood, not to work upon others by words, but by actions. If we love one another as Christ loved us, we must wash one another's feet, as he commanded his apostles; there is a priestly duty lies upon every man, brotherly to reprehend a brother whom he secr trampling in foul ways, wallowing in foul sins.

GOD MAY BE WORSHIPPED ANYWHERE.

It is true, God may be devoutly worshipped anywhere; in all places of his dominion, my soul shall praise the Lord, says Dav d. It is not only a concurring of men, a meeting of so many bodies that makes a church; if thy soul and body be met together, an

1 Pure feet.

humble preparation of the mind, and a reverent disposition of the body; if thy knees be bent to the earth, thy hands and eyes lifted up to heaven; if thy tongue pray, and praise, and thine ears hearken to his answer; if all thy senses, and powers, and faculties be met with one unanime purpose to worship thy God, thou art, to this intendment, a church, thou art a congregation; here are two or three met together in his name, and he is in the midst of them, though thou be alone in thy chamber. The church of God should be built upon a rock, and yet Job had his church upon a dunghill; the church is to be placed upon the top of a hill, and yet the prophet Jeremy had his church in a miry dungeon; constancy and settledness belong to the church, and yet Jonah had his church in the whale's belly; the lion that roars, and seeks whom he may devour, is an enemy to this church, and yet Daniel had his church in the lion's den; the waters of rest in the Psalm were a figure of the church, and yet the three children had their church in the fiery furnace; liberty and life appertain to the church, and yet Peter and Paul had their church in prison, and the thief had his church upon the cross. Every particular man is himself a temple of the Holy Ghost; yea, destroy this body by death and corruption in the grave, and yet there shall be a renewing, a re-edifying of all those temples, in the general resurrection when we shall rise again, not only as so many Christians, but as so many Christian churches, to glorify the apostle and high-priest of our profession, Christ Jesus, in that eternal Sabbath. Every person, every place is fit to glorify God in.

THE GREATEST CROSS IS TO HAVE NO CROSS.

I lack one

There cannot be so great a cross as to have none. loaf of that daily bread that I pray for, if I have no cross; for afflictions are our spiritual nourishment: I lack one limb of that body I must grow into, which is the body of Christ Jesus, if I have no crosses; for, my conformity to Christ (and that is my being made up into his body) must be accomplished in my fulfiling his sufferings in his flesh.

ANGER.

Anger is not always a defect, nor an inordinateness in man ; Be angry, and sin not: anger is not utterly to be rooted out of our ground and cast away, but transplanted; a gardener doe well to grub up thorns in his garden; there they would hinde. good herbs from growing: but he does well to plant those thorns in his hedges; there they keep bad neighbors from entering. In many cases, where there is no anger, there is not much zeal.

MICHAEL DRAYTON. 1563-1631.

Tais very voluminous and once popular writer has sunk into an oblivion which he does not deserve. His poems are mostly of an historical and topographical character. Such is his great work, his " Poly-Olbion," a work of stupendous labor and accurate information, on which he rested his hopes of immortality. It is a very singular poem, and certainly entirely original in its plan, describing the woods, mountains, valleys, and rivers of England with all their associations, traditional, histerical, and antiquarian. That "it possesses many beauties which are poetically great, and is full of delineations which are graphically correct," is no doubt true; but, after all, it is a poem that will always be consulted rather for the information it conveys, than for the pleasure it produces. His other historical poems are his "Barons Warres," being an account of "The lamentable Civil Warres of Edward the Second and the Barons;" his "Legends;" his "Battle of Agincourt;" and " England's Heroical Epistles."

But it is for his pastoral and miscellaneous poems that Drayton will continue to be known and valued. Some of these possess beauties of the highest order. Such, for instance, is the fairy poem called Nymphidia, than which a more xquisite creation of the fancy can hardly be found; and it has been well emarked, that had he written nothing else he would deserve immortality." dis "Shepherd's Garland" is a pastoral poem, first published under this title, ut afterwards revised and reprinted under the name of Eclogues. His other niscellaneous poems consist of odes, elegies, sonnets, religious effusions, &c Drayton died December 23, 1631, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

CHORUS OF THE BIRDS.

When Phoebus lifts his head out of the winter's wave,
No sooner does the earth her flowery bosom brave,
At such time as the year brings on the pleasant spring,
But "hunt's-up" to the morn the feather'd sylvans sing:
And in the lower grove, as on the rising knoll,
Upon the highest spray of every mounting pole
Those quiristers are perched, with many a speckled breast.
Then from her burnish'd gate the goodly glittering East
Gilds every lofty top, which late the humorous night
Bespangled had with pearl to please the morning's sight:
On which the mirthful quires, with their clear open throats,
Unto the joyful morn so strain their warbling notes,
That hills and valleys ring, and even the echoing air
Seems all composed of sounds, about them everywhere.
The throstle, with shrill sharps; as purposely he song
Tawake the lustless sun; or chiding that so long
He was in coming forth, that should the thickets thrill;
The woosel near at hand, that hath a golden bill;
As nature him had markt of purpose to let see
That from all other birds his tunes should different be,

1 From the Greek rolλa (polia), “many things;" that is, many things about Albion, or England

2 Read-a notice of Drayton in Drake's "Shakspeare and his Times;" another, in the third volume of D'Israeli's "Amenities of Literature;" and another, in Sir Egerton Brydges's "Imaginative Biography."