At sunset, as I calmly stand
A stranger on an alien strand,

Familiar as my childhood's home
Seems the long stretch of wave and foam,

One sails toward me o'er the bay,
And what he comes to do and say

I can foretell. A prescient lore
Springs from some life outlived of yore.
O swift, instinctive, startling gleams
Of deep soul-knowledge! not as dreams,
For aye ye vaguely dawn and die,
But oft, with lightning certainty,

Pierce through the dark, oblivious brain,
To make odd thoughts and memories plain :
Thoughts which perchance must travel back
Across the wild, bewildering track

Of countless æons; memories far,
High-reaching as yon pallid star,

Unknown, scarce seen, whose flickering grace
Faints on the outmost rings of space.

A COMPARISON.

I think, oft-times, that lives of men may be
Likened to wandering winds that come and go.
Not knowing whence they rise, whither they blow
O'er the vast globe, voiceful of grief or glee.
Some lives are buoyant zephyrs, sporting free
In tropic sunshine; some long winds of woe
That shun the day, wailing with murmurs low,
Through haunted twilights, by the unresting sea;
Others are ruthless, stormful, drunk with night,
Born of deep passion or malign desire:
They rave 'mid thunderpeals and clouds of fire.
Wild, reckless all, save that some power unknown
Guides each blind force till life be overblown,
Lost in vague hollows of the fathomless night.

THE DEAD YEAR.

A moment since his breath dissolved in air !
And now divorced from life's last hectic glow,
He joins the ghostly years of long ago

In some cloud-folded realm of vague despair;
Ah me! the unsceptred years that wander there!
What cold, wan hands, and faces white as snow,
And echoes of dead voices quavering low-
The phantom-burden of long-perished care!
Perchance all unsubstantialized and gray,
Time's earliest year now greets his last, deceased;
Or he that dumbly gazed on Adam's fall,
Palely emerging from the shadowy east,

With flickering semblance of cold crown and pall,
Clothes the dim ghost of him just passed away!

THE SUPREME HOUR.

There comes an hour when all life's joys and pains
To our raised vision seem

But as the flickering phantom that remains
Of some dead midnight dream!

There comes an hour when earth recedes so far,
Its wasted wavering ray

Wanes to the ghostly pallor of a star
Merged in the Milky Way.

Set on the sharp, sheer summit that divides
Immortal truth from mortal fantasy;
We hear the moaning of time's muffled tides
In measureless distance die!

Past passions, loves, ambitions, and despairs,
Across the expiring swell

Send thro' void space, like wafts of Lethean airs,
Vague voices of farewell.

Ah, then! from life's long-haunted dream we part Roused as a child new-born,

We feel the pulses of the eternal heart

Throb thro' the eternal morn.

HAZLITT, WILLIAM, an English literary critic and essayist, born at Maidstone, Kent, April 10, 1778; died in London, September 18, 1830. His father was a Unitarian clergyman, and he himself was designed for the ministry of that denomination. But he gave attention to literature and art rather than to theology. At first he attempted portrait painting with indifferent success. He afterward became connected with several periodicals, for which he wrote criticisms upon art, literature, and literary men. His literary work threw him into the company of Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Moore, Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth, but being of peculiar disposition he quarrelled with all of them. At the age of thirty he married, but was divorced at the end of fourteen years. Two years later he married a wealthy widow, with whom he went abroad, but separated from her within a year. Soon afterward he fell madly in love with a servant girl of more than questionable character. Near the close of his life he fell into great pecuniary straits. His principal works are: Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817); A View of the English Stage (1818); Lectures on the English Poets (1818); On the English Comic Writers (1819); On the Literature of the Elizabethan Age (1821); Table Talk (1824); The Spirit of the Age (1825); Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (1828).

THE ELIZABETHAN AGE.

The age of Elizabeth was distinguished beyond, perhaps, any other in our history by a number of great men, famous in different ways, and whose names have come down to us with unblemished honors-statesmen, warriors, divines, scholars, poets, and philosophers; Raleigh, Drake, Coke, Hooker, and higher and more sounding still, and more frequent in our mouths, Shakespeare, Spenser, Sydney, Bacon, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher-men whom fame has eternized in her long and brilliant scroll, and who by their words and acts, were benefactors of their country and ornaments of human nature. Their attainments of different kinds

Per

bore the same general stamp, and it was sterling. haps the genius of Great Britain never shone out fuller or brighter or looked more like itself than at this period. For such an extraordinary combination and development of fancy and genius many causes may be assigned; and we may seek for the chief of them in religion, in politics, in the circumstances of the time, the recent diffusion of letters, in local situations, and in the characters of the men who adorned that period, and availed themselves so nobly of the advantages placed within their reach. I shall here attempt to give a general sketch of these causes, and of the manner in which they operated to mould and stamp the poetry of the country at the period of which I have to treat, independently of incidental and fortuitous causes, for which there is no accounting, but which, after all, have often the greatest share in determining the most important results.

The first cause I shall mention as contributing to this general effect was the Reformation which had just then taken place. This event gave a mighty impulse and increased activity to thought and inquiry, and agitated the inert mass of accumulated prejudices throughout Europe. The effect of the concussion was general; but the shock was greatest in this country. It toppled down the full-grown intolerable abuses of centuries at a blow; heaved the ground from under the feet of bigoted faith and slavish obedience, and the roar and dashing of opinions, loosened from their accustomed

hold, might be heard like the noise of an angry sea, and has never yet subsided. Germany first broke the spell of misbegotten fear, and gave the watchword; but England joined the shout, and echoed it back with her island voice from her thousand cliffs and craggy shores, in a longer and louder strain. With that cry the genius of Great Britain rose, and threw down the gauntlet to the nations. There was a mighty fermentation; the waters were out; public opinion was in a state of projection. Liberty was held out to all to think and speak the truth. Men's brains were busy, their spirits stirring, their hearts full, and their hands not idle. Their eyes were opened to expect the greatest things and their ears burned with curiosity and zeal to know the truth, that the truth might make them free. The death-blow which had been struck at scarlet vice and bloated hypocrisy loosened their tongues and made the talismans and love-tokens of Popish superstition, with which she had beguiled her followers and committed abominations with the people, fall harmless from their necks.

The translation of the Bible was the chief engine of the great work. It threw open, by a secret spring, the rich treasures of religion and morality which had been there locked up as in a shrine. It revealed the vision of the prophets and conveyed the lessons of inspired teachers to the meanest of the people. It gave them a common interest in a common cause. Their hearts burned within them as they read. It gave a mind to the people by giving them common subjects of thought and feeling. It cemented their union of character and sentiment. It created endless diversity and collision of opinion. They found objects to employ their faculties, and a motive in the magnitude of the consequences attached to them, to exert the utmost eagerness in the pursuit of truth, and the most daring intrepidity in maintaining it.

Religious controversy sharpens the understanding by the subtlety and remoteness of the topics it discusses, and embraces the will by their infinite importance. We perceive in this period a nervous masculine intellect. No levity, no feebleness, no indifference; or, if there were, it is a relaxation from the intense activity which gives a tone to its general character. But there is a