with the following striking sketch of the masses from which his more individuallized pictures are hereafter to start. All, he observes, heard the warning blast, and however separated by the intervention of distant ages, here in one vast conflux met.

Gray forms that lived

When Time himself was young, whose temples shook The hoary honours of a thousand years,

Stood side by side with Roman consuls:- here, 'Mid prophets old, and Heaven-inspired bards, Were Grecian heroes seen :

there, from a crowd

Of reverend Patriarchs, towered the nodding

plumes,

Tiars, and helms, and sparkling diadems

Of Persia's, Egypt's, or Assyria's kings;

Clad as when forth the hundred gates of Thebes
On sounding cars her hundred princes rushed;
Or, when, at night, from off the terrace top
Of his aerial garden, touched to sooth
The troubled Monarch, came the solemn chime
Of sackbut, psaltery, and harp, adown
The Euphrates, floating in the moonlight wide
O'er sleeping Babylon. For all appeared
As in their days of earthly pride; the clank

Of steel announced the warrior, and the robe
Of Tyrian lustre spoke the blood of Kings.

It must be evident that on the scheme developed at the close of this fine passage, a field of almost incalculable extent is opened for the introduction of bold and picturesque imagery, and our poet has availed himself of it in a manner which has given an air of originality to his work.

From the multiplicity of objects, however, which this system necessarily brought forward on the imagination of the poet, it became indispensable to make a very rigorous, and at the same time a very judicious selection, especially in a poem whose limits were not to extend beyond forty pages. He has therefore chosen a few very distinguished personages, and has thrown round them a high degree of prominency and relief. They are taken from widely different ages and classes of society; some from the primeval and patriarchal world, as Adam, Abraham, and Joseph; some from the list of heroes, as the Founder of Babylon, Alexander the Great, and the Dictator Cæsar. From

the benefactors of their species, the legislators and philosophers of mankind, he has drawn forth the ever memorable names of Moses, Plato, and Socrates; and from the Christian dispensation appear the hallowed forms of the Mother and the Disciples of our Saviour.

It will of course be expected that I should offer to my readers some specimens of the mode in which this very material part of the subject is treated, and I shall, therefore, give the first and the last of these portraits, not as the most elaborate of their number, but as presenting very adequate proofs of the talents of the writer for the task he has undertaken.

Nearest the mount of that mixed phalanx, first
Our general Parent stood: not as he looked
Wandering, at eve, amid the shady bowers
And odorous groves of that delicious garden,
Or flow'ry banks of some soft rolling stream,
Pausing to list its lulling murmur, hand
In hand with peerless Eve, the rose too sweet,
Fatal to Paradise. Fled from his cheek

The bloom of Eden; his hyacinthine locks

Were changed to grey; with years and sorrows bowed

He seemed; but through his ruined form still shone
The majesty of his Creator: round

Upon his sons a grieved and pitying look
He cast, and in his vesture hid his face.

To this delineation, touched with a pencil at once graceful and tender, shall now be added a sketch of the Babylonian monarch; in its outline bold and free, and impressive; and in its accompaniments, approaching the character of the sublime. With the former, we are reminded of the dignity and pathos of Raphael; with the latter, of the strength and majesty of Michael Angelo.

Girt by a crowd of monarchs, of whose fame
Scarce a memorial lives, who fought and reigned
While the historic lamp shed glimmering light,
Above the rest, one regal port aspired,
Crowned like Assyria's princes; not a crest
O'ertopped him, save the giant seraphim.
His countenance, more piercing than the beam
Of the sun-gazing eagle, earthward bent
Its glance-tempered with awe.

His powerful arm founded old Babylon;

Whose bulwarks, like the eternal mountains, heaved

Their adamantine heads; whose brazen gates
Beleaguering nations foiled, and bolts of war,
Unshaken, answered as the pelting hail.
House of the kingdom! glorious Babylon!
Earth's marvel, and of unborn time the theme!
Say where thou stood'st:-Or, can the fisherman,
Plying his task on the Euphrates, now

A silent, silver, unpolluted tide,

Point to thy grave and answer? From a sash
O'er his broad shoulder hung the ponderous sword,
Fatal as sulphurous fires to Nineveh;

That levelled with her waves the walls of Tyrus,
Queen of the sea; to its foundations shook
Jerusalem, and reaped the fields of Egypt.

Striking and picturesque as this part of the work must be deemed, it is yet inferior, both in interest and pathos, to the concluding portions of the poem, in which the author appears to have put forth his full strength. He is here employed in delineating the result of the last dread tribunal, and the influence of conscience on the trembling myriads, as they touched the mysterious circle of the judgment seat; and beheld, as with the rapidity of lightning, their past existence rising before them, with all its deeds and dark