curse. They languish, because none feel with them their common nature. They are morally dead. They are neither friends, nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor benefactors of their country. Among those who attempt to exist without human sympathy, the pure and tender-hearted perish through the intensity and passion of their search after its communities, when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. All else, selfish, blind, and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes who constitute, together with their own, the lasting misery and loneliness of the world. Those who love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.

excellent and majestic, to the contempla- and such as they, have their apportioned tion of the universe. He drinks deep of the fountains of knowledge, and is still insatiate. The magnificence and beauty of the external world sinks profoundly into the frame of his conceptions, and affords to their modifications a variety not to be exhausted. So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous, and tranquil, and self-possessed. But the period arrives when these objects cease to suffice. His mind is at length suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself. He images to himself the Being whom he loves. Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures, the vision in which he embodies his own imaginations unites all of wonderful, or wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher, or the lover could depicture. The intellectual faculties, the imagination, the functions of sense, have their respective requisitions on the sympathy of corresponding powers in other human beings. The Poet is represented as uniting these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image. He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave.

The picture is not barren of instruction

to actual men.

"The good die first, And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust, Burn to the socket!"

December 14, 1815.

Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quærebam quid amarem, amans amare.-Confess. St. August.

EARTH, ocean, air, beloved brother-
hood!

If our great Mother has imbued my soul
With aught of natural piety to feel
Your love, and recompense the boon

with mine;

If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and

even,

With sunset and its gorgeous ministers,
And solemn midnight's tingling silent-

ness;

The Poet's self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin. But that Power which strikes the luminaries of the world with sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influences, dooms to a slow and poisonous decay those meaner spirits that dare to abjure its dominion. Their destiny is more abject and inglorious as their delinquency is more contemptible and pernicious. They who, deluded by no generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth, and cherishing no hopes If spring's voluptuous pantings when beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies with their kind, rejoicing neither in human Her first sweet kisses, have been dear joy nor mourning with human grief; these,

If autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood,

And winter robing with pure snow and

crowns

Of starry ice the gray grass and bare boughs;

she breathes

to me;

S

G

May modulate with murmurs of the air, No portion of your wonted favour now! And motions of the forests and the sea, And voice of living beings, and woven hymns

Favour my solemn song, for I have Of night and day, and the deep heart of

Of thy deep mysteries. I have made But the charmed eddies of autumnal

In charnels and on coffins, where black Built o'er his mouldering bones a pyradeath mid Keeps record of the trophies won from Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderthee,

Hoping to still these obstinate ques- A lovely youth,

And sound from the vast earth and Until the doves and squirrels would

Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of Lured by the gentle meaning of his

Many a wide waste and tangled wilder- Obedient to high thoughts, has visited
The awful ruins of the days of old:
Has lured his fearless steps; and he has Athens, and Tyre, and Balbec, and the
bought

With his sweet voice and eyes, from Where stood Jerusalem, the fallen towers Of Babylon, the eternal pyramids, Memphis and Thebes, and whatsoe'er of strange

And the green earth lost in his heart its Flashed like strong inspiration, and he claims

To love and wonder; he would linger | The thrilling secrets of the birth of time.

Her daily portion, from her father's Knowledge and truth and virtue were tent, her theme, And spread her matting for his couch, And lofty hopes of divine liberty, Thoughts the most dear to him, and

and stole

From duties and repose to tend his

steps:

Enamoured, yet not daring for deep awe To speak her love:-and watched his nightly sleep,

Sleepless herself, to gaze upon his lips Parted in slumber, whence the regular breath

Of innocent dreams arose: then, when red morn

Made paler the pale moon, to her cold home

Wildered, and wan, and panting, she returned.

waste,

fill

The Poet wandering on, through The beating of her heart was heard to Arabie And Persia, and the wild Carmanian The pauses of her music, and her breath Tumultuously accorded with those fits And o'er the aërial mountains which Of intermitted song. Sudden she rose, As if her heart impatiently endured Its bursting burthen: at the sound he turned,

pour down

Indus and Oxus from their icy caves,
In joy and exultation held his way;
Till in the vale of Cashmire, far within
Its loneliest dell, where odorous plants
entwine

Beneath the hollow rocks a natural
bower,

Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched

And saw by the warm light of their own life

Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil

Of woven wind, her outspread arms now

bare,
night,

His languid limbs. A vision on his sleep Her dark locks floating in the breath of There came, a dream of hopes that

never yet

Had flushed his cheek.

veiled maid

tones.

Her beamy bending eyes, her parted lips He dreamed a Outstretched, and pale, and quivering

eagerly.

Sate near him, talking in low solemn His strong heart sunk and sickened with

excess

Her voice was like the voice of his own Of love. He reared his shuddering

soul

limbs and quelled

Heard in the calm of thought; its music His gasping breath, and spread his arms

Like woven sounds of streams and Her panting bosom :

Folded his frame in her dissolving arms. Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night

Involved and swallowed up the vision; sleep,

Like a dark flood suspended in its

course,

Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain.

While death's blue vault, with loathliest vapours hung,

Where every shade which the foul grave exhales

Hides its dead eye from the detested day,

Conduct, O Sleep, to thy delightful realms?

This doubt with sudden tide flowed on his heart;

Roused by the shock he started from The insatiate hope which it awakened

The cold white light of morning, the His brain even like despair.

blue moon

While daylight held

Low in the west, the clear and garish The sky, the Poet kept mute conference With his still soul. At night the pas

hills,

The distinct valley and the vacant
woods,

Spread round him where he stood.
Whither have fled

The hues of heaven that canopied his
bower

Of yesternight?

The sounds that

soothed his sleep, The mystery and the majesty of Earth, The joy, the exultation? His wan eyes Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly As ocean's moon looks on the moon in heaven.

sion came,

Like the fierce fiend of a distempered dream,

And shook him from his rest, and led him forth

Into the darkness.-As an eagle, grasped In folds of the green serpent, feels her breast

Burn with the poison, and precipitates Through night and day, tempest, and calm, and cloud,

Frantic with dizzying anguish, her blind flight

The spirit of sweet human love has sent O'er the wide aëry wilderness: thus A vision to the sleep of him who

In the wide pathless desert of dim sleep,
That beautiful shape! Does the dark
gate of death

Conduct to thy mysterious paradise,
O Sleep? Does the bright arch of rain-
bow clouds,

driven

Till vast Aornos seen from Petra's steep Hung o'er the low horizon like a cloud; And pendent mountains seen in the calm Through Balk, and where the desolated

Lead only to a black and watery depth, Of Parthian kings scatter to every wind