XII.

Our love was like most other loves ;

A little glow, a little shiver,

A rose-bud, and a pair of gloves,

And "Fly not yet" upon the river; Some jealousy of some one's heir,

Some hopes of dying broken-hearted;

A miniature, a lock of hair,

The usual vows, and then we parted.

XIII.

We parted-months and years rolled by; We met again four summers after;

Our parting was all sob and sigh;

Our meeting was all mirth and laughter :

For in my heart's most secret cell

There had been many other lodgers; And she was not the Ball-Room's Belle, But only Mrs. Something Rogers.

THE LAST OF THE TITANS.

BY WILLIAM HOWITT.

DALOOM, the Bedouin poet, gave the hospitality of the night to a Mameluke who was speeding on-secret embassage of state. The Mameluke, in return for his kindness, perpetrated the greatest outrage that can be inflicted on the heart of man;-and, instead of thanks, departed before daybreak with laughter of a fiend. Daloom, whose soul possessed all the fire and irritability of his race and profession, was furious with indignation and revenge; and not he alone,-but his whole tribe was on flame. They surrounded his house in a tumultuous crowd. The sheik placed at his door the fleetest dromedary of the East;-one chief put into his hand a deadly ataghan ;- - a second, with his own girdle, braced him for the swiftest flight;—another group, laying hold of him, placed him in the saddle; and all, with ten thousand burning curses on the Atheist Mameluke, bade him begone.

He shot through the desert like a meteor. Cairo was his object; and in a few days he was treading its streets. He saw his detested enemy;- he watched him with a lynx's eyes;—he dogged him with a tiger's foot,—but it was in vain. He beheld him surrounded by crowds of his fellows, as callous, as reckless, as godless as himself. They feasted, they laughed, they lived as if care had never been on earth, God in heaven, or vengeance in hell but the infuriated poet might as well have attempted to pull down the eternal sky, as to approach him. Rank, which he had not suspected beneath the ordinary guise of a Mameluke, surrounded him as with a wall of adamant. Between him and Daloom's dagger were a thousand quick eyes, a thousand fearless hearts; and if the injured man sought redress by complaint to his superiors, a laughter which thrilled through him as an echo of the peal of the Mameluke, as he shot from his door, was his only answer. His heart was choked within him with the excess of his wrath,- his brain was maddened to desperation; and pouring out imprecations against heaven, earth, and mankind, he flew back to his native regions.

Three days he had driven along in the vehemence of his transport. Lost in the turmoil of his distracted spirit, he had seen nothing of the tract through which he had passed; he trusted his route to the dromedary, which flew on like an arrow. He woke with a start, as from a tumultuous dream, as he suddenly found himself

involved in a whirlwind, which raised the sands of the desert into a mighty cloud, and wrapped him in darkness and suffocation. The next moment he beheld the black hurricane rushing forwards; and having for a few seconds followed, with his eyes, its career with terror and astonishment, he looked round,- and was not the less amazed to behold himself at the foot of an obelisk, whose slender shaft arose into the very heaven,—and in the vast square of a gigantic city. The shock of his wonder was like that of lightning. The sudden transition from the fierce and boiling torrent of his own passionate thoughts, was marvellous. The scenes around were of a magnitude which astounded him; the silence sank into his soul with all its vastness-deep, lifeless, and terrific. He looked on all sides for some trace of existence ;-he saw none, but in himself and dromedary. He glanced up the obelisk beside him till his eye recoiled dizzily from its fearful altitude; he turned his gaze upon the towers, and his spirit sank crushed, as it were, beneath the overwhelming sense of their immensity. What hands could have piled those massy and stupendous towers? What might of men, in millions, could have reared those ponderous and gigantic columns, which, baffling the eye with the immensity of their bulk, shot up to the loftiest regions of air, and bore incumbent pediments and dependent scrolls, whose dimensions the imagination laboured in vain to grasp.

Daloom would gladly have persuaded himself that he

was in a dream, but his convictions were positive of waking existence, and he stood oppressed with the greatness of all without, and the vanity of all within him. "What are the griefs, the passions, the interests of a creature like me; a pigmy-an atom of the dust? The beings glorious, and to my imagination, almost omnipotent, who built and inhabited these mysterious dwellings, have probably passed away; and if they have gone down to impenetrable oblivion, what will be my departure from the earth? The ceasing of a momentary breeze in the illimitable air! the extinction of a spark in the conflagration of a city!" As he thus moralised, his eye involuntarily fixed itself on the colossal portal of a most august palace, which stood open before him. A peristyle of those enormous pillars composed its front; and on each hand a row of gigantic sphinges guarded its entrance. It was not till a long contemplation of the greatness of all these objects had, in some degree, familiarised him to their strangeness, that his curiosity overcame his awe, and he determined to enter.

When, however, he began to move, the diminutiveness of his steps, the feebleness of his motions, contrasted with the vastness and the solidity of every thing around him, redoubled his amazement, and forced upon his senses the infinite distance between these works and himself; and when he reached a pillar, and, looking up, found that his stature was not a tenth part of that of its base, he again stood fixed to the ground in wonder.