account of its intrinsic merit, though that was considerable, as that it formed the commencement of a subject which certainly much more than many you have hitherto treated of, desired a share of your readers' consideration. I trust, that through your future exertions, this desideratum in the literature of Scotland will be

speedily and effectually supplied.-I
remain your obedient well-wisher,
D. MACFARLANE, JUN.
Aberfoyle, 4th June 1819.

I have used the freedom to send you a present of some Loch Ard trouts killed this morning. Is not the larg est of the dozen a singularly large trout? He is like a fish.

LETTER FROM MR ODOHERTY, ENCLOSING THE THIRD PART OF CHRISTABEL.

MY DEAR Editor,

I need not say how much obliged to you I am for your kind recommendation of my poems to the notice of the public. Such liberality does you credit, and "I verily believe promotes your sale." Nothing can more decidedly prove the degraded state of our periodical criticism, than this fact, that not one review, but your own incomparable one, has so much as alluded to the existence of my poetry. What Mr Gifford can mean by such neglect of a man of at least equal genius with himself, I leave him to explain to the world, when and how he can-as for Mr Jeffrey, the well-known difference of our political sentiments The Monthly Reviewers hate me because sufficiently accounts for his silence. I am not a Unitarian, nor dissenter of any kind, and the British Critic looks down upon me because I am neither an Oxonian nor a Cantab. Of the notice of "Maga" I am not very ambitious, having been long tired of old women, and I do trust should my muse ever be buried, Colburn will not suffer that vampyre, Dr Polidori, to suck her blood. To you, therefore, my sweet editor, my undivided gratitude is due, and it shall be expressed in a way most conducive to your interests. You must have observed with regret, that many of our best living poets leave their greatest works in an unfinished state. It is my intention to finish these works for them, for I never could, at any period of my life, bear to think that any thing should be left but half done. I have accordingly finished Mr Coleridge's Christabel, and what was a still more laborious task, Mr Wordsworth's Excursion. If Lord Byron does not publish Don Juan speedily, I will, for I have written him, and he is very restless in my desk. I have likewise ready for the press, a thick octavo of " Plays on the Passions," which, if Miss Joanna Baillie does not bestir herself, shall infallibly be out before the fall of the leaf. In short, I wish, like the celebrated Macvey Napier, Esq., to become a SUPPLEMENTARY GENIUS, and while he undertakes to render complete all the rest of human knowledge, permit me to do the same service to poetry. I have sent you the third part of Christabel, per my friend the "Bagman," who, so far from being a fool, as one of your critics averred, is next to our friend D, one of the sharpest blades in Glasgow. You will receive a bale of the Excursion by the waggon very soon.-Yours, for ever and a day, MORGAN ODOHERTY.

Archie Cameron's College, Glasgow.

4th June.

CHRISTABEL.

The Introduction to Part the Third.

LISTEN! ye know that I am mad,

And ye will listen!-wizard dreams

Were with me!-all is true that seems!

From dreams alone can truth be had

In dreams divinest lore is taught,

For the eye, no more distraught,
Rests most calmly, and the ear,

Of sound unconscious, may apply
Its attributes unknown, to hear
The music of philosophy!

Thus am I wisest in my sleep,

For thoughts and things, which day-light brings,

Come to the spirit sad and single,
But verse and prose, and joys and woes
Inextricably mingle,

When the hushed frame is silent in repose!
Twilight and moonlight, mist and storm,
Black night, and fire-eyed hurricane,
And crested lightning, and the snows
That mock the sunbeams, and the rain
Which bounds on earth with big drops warm,
All are round me while I spell
The legend of sweet Christabel !

CHRISTABEL, PART THIRD.

NINE moons have waxed, and the tenth, in its wane,
Sees Christabel struggle in unknown pain!
-For many moons was her eye less bright,
For many moons was her vest more tight,

And her cheek was pale, save when, with a start,
The life blood came from the panting heart,
And fluttering, o'er that thin fair face
Past with a rapid nameless pace,

And at moments a big tear filled the eye,
And at moments a short and smothered sigh
Swelled her breast with sudden strain,
Breathed half in grief, and half in pain,
For her's are pangs, on the rack that wind
The outward frame and the inward mind.
—And when at night she did visit the oak,
She wore the Baron's scarlet cloak,
(That cloak which happy to hear and to tell
Was lined with the fur of the leopard well,)
And as she wandered down the dell
None said 'twas the lady Christabel.-
Some thought 'twas a weird and ugsome elf,
Some deemed 'twas the sick old Baron himself,
Who wandered beneath the snowy lift

To count his beads in solemn shrift-
(For his shape below was wide to see
All bloated with the hydropsie.)

Oh! had her old father the secret known,
He had stood as stark as the statue of stone
That stands so silent, and white, and tall,
At the upper end of his banquet hall!

Am I asleep or am I awake?

In very truth I oft mistake,

-

As the stories of old come over my brain,
And I build in spirit the mystic strain ;-
Ah! would to the virgin that I were asleep!
But I must wake, and I must weep!

Sweet Christabel, it is not well
That a lady, pure as the sunless snow
That lies so soft on the mountain's brow,

That a maiden of sinless chastity

In childbirth pangs should be doomed to die,
Or live with a name of sorrow and shame,
And hear the words of blemish and blame !
-For the world that smiles at the guilt of man,
Places woman beneath its ban;

Alas, that scandal thus should wreak
Its vengeance on the warm and weak,
That the arrows of the cold and dull
Should wound the breast of the beautiful!

Of the things that be did we know but half,
Many, and many would weep, who laugh!
Tears would darken many an eye,

Or that deeper grief, (when its orb is dry,
When it cannot dare the eye of day),
O'er the clouded heart would sway,
Till it crumbled like desert dust away!
But here we meet with grief and grudge,
And they who cannot know us, judge!
Thus, souls on whom good angels smile,
Are scoffed at in our world of guile—
Let this, Ladiè, thy comfort be;
Man knows not us, good angels know
The things that pass in the world below;
And scarce, methinks, it seems unjust,

That the world should view thee with mistrust,
For who that saw that child of thine
Pale Christabel, who could divine
That its sire was the Ladie Geraldine?

But in I rush, with too swift a gale,

Into the ocean of my tale!

Not yet young Christabel, I ween,

Of her babe hath lighter been.

-'Tis the month of the snow and the blast,

And the days of Christmas mirth are past,

When the oak-roots heaped on the hearth blazed bright,

Casting a broad and dusky light

On the shadowy forms of the warriors old,

Who stared from the wall, most grim to behold

On shields where the spider his tapestry weaves,

On the holly boughs and the ivy leaves,

The few green glories that still remain

To mock the storm and welcome the rain,

Brighter and livelier mid tempest and shower,
Like a hero in the battle hour!-

Brave emblems o'er the winter hearth,
They cheered our fathers' hours of mirth

Twelve solar months complete and clear
The magic circle of the year!
Each (the ancient riddle saith)
Children, two times thirty, hath !
Three times ten are fair and white,
Three times ten are black as night,
Three times ten hath Hecatè,
Three times ten the God of day;
Thus spoke the old hierophant

(I saw her big breast swelling pant)

What time, I dreamed, in ghostly wise
Of Eleusinian mysteries,

For I am the hierarch

Of the mystical and dark

And now, if rightly I do spell

Of the lady Christabel,

She hates the three times ten so white,
And sickens in their searching light,

And woe is hers-alas! alack!

She hates the three times ten so black-
As a mastiff bitch doth bark,

I hear her moaning in the dark!—

"Tis the month of January,
Why lovely maiden, light and airy,
While the moon can scarcely glow,
Thro' the plumes of falling snow,
While the moss upon the bark
Is withered all, and damp, and dark,
While cold above the stars in doubt
Look dull, and scarcely will stay out,

While the snow is heavy on beechen bower
And hides its name-sake, the snow-drop flower,
Why walk forth thus mysteriously?

Dear girl, I ask thee seriously.

Thy cheek is pale, thy locks are wild

Ah, think, how big thou art with child!—

Tho' the baron's red cloak thro' the land hath no f llow,
Thou should'st not thus venture without an umbrella!

Dost thou wander to the field of graves

Where the elder its spectral branches waves?
And will thy hurried footsteps halt

Where thy mother sleeps in the silent vault?
Where the stranger pauses long to explore
The emblems quaint of heraldic lore,
Where tho' the lines are tarnished and dim,
Thy mother's features stare gaunt and grim,
And grinning skull, and transverse bone,
And the names of warriors dead and gone
Mark Sir Leoline's burial stone;

Thither go not, or I deem almost

That thou wilt frighten thy mother's ghost!

Or wilt thou wend to the huge oak-tree,
And, kneeling down upon thy knee,
Number the beads of thy rosary?
Nine beads of gold and a tenth of pearl,
And a prayer with each, my lovely girl,
Nine, and one, shalt thou record,
Nine to the virgin and one to the Lord!
The pearls are ten times one to behold,
And ten times nine are the beads of gold,
Methinks 'tis hard of the friar to ask
On a night like this so weary a task!

'Tis pleasant-'tis pleasant, in summer time,
In the green wood to spell the storied rhyme,

When the light winds above 'mong the light leaves are singing,
And the song of the birds thro' your heart is ringing,

"Tis pleasant-'tis pleasant, when happily humming
To the flowers below the blythe bee is coming !—
When the rivulet coy, and ashamed to be seen,

Is heard where it hides 'mong the grass-blades green,
When the light of the moon and each sweet starry islet
Gives a charm more divine to the long summer twilight,
When the breeze o'er the blossomy hawthorn comes cheerful,
'Tis pleasant with heart-ah, how happy!-tho' fearful,
With heaven-beaming eyes, where tears come, while smiles glisten
To the lover's low vows in the silence to listen!

One-Two-Three-Four-Five-Six-Seven-Eight-Nine-Ten

Eleven!

Tempest or calm-moonshine or shower,
The castle clock still tolls the hour,

And the cock awakens, and echoes the sound,
And is answered by the owls around-

And at every measured tone

You may hear the old baron grunt and groan;
'Tis a thing of wonder, and fright, and fear,
The mastiff-bitch's moans to hear-
And the aged cow in her stall that stands
And is milked each morning by female hands
(That the baron's breakfast of milk and bread
May be brought betimes to the old man's bed
Who often gives, while he is dressing,
His Christabel a father's blessing)
That aged cow, as each stroke sounds slow,
Answers it with a plaintive low!
And the baron old, who is ill at rest,
Curses the favourite cat for a pest-
For let him pray, or let him weep,

She mews thro' all the hours of sleep-
Till morning comes with its pleasant beams,
And the cat is at rest, and the baron dreams!

Let it rain, however fast,

Rest from rain will come at last,
And the blaze that strongest flashes
Sinks at last, and ends in ashes!
But sorrow from the human heart
And mists of care will they depart?
I know not, and cannot tell,
Saith the lady Christabel-
But I feel my bosom swell!