And while I gaze, thy mild and plăcid light
Sheds a soft calm upon my troubled breast;
And oft I think, fair planet of the night,

That in thy orb the wretched may have rest;
The sufferers of the earth perhaps may go,
Released by death, to thy benignant sphere,
And the sad children of despair and woe

Forget, in thee, their cup of sorrow here.
Oh! that I soon may reach thy world serene,
Poor wearied pilgrim in this toiling scene!

IX.

THE STARS.-DARWIN.'

ROLL on, ye stars; exult in youthful prime;
Mark with bright curves the printless steps of Time;
Near and more near your beamy cars approach,
And lessening orbs on lessening orbs encroach;
Flowers of the sky, ye, too, to age must yield,
Frail as your silken sisters of the field.
Star after star from heaven's high arch shall rush,
Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush,
Headlong, extinct, to one dark center fall,
And death, and night, and chaos mingle all;
Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm,
Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form,
Mounts from her funeral pyre, on wings of flame,
And soars and shines, another and the same.

148. LANDSCAPE BEAUTY.

IT is easy enough to understand how the sight of a picture of

the original nor is it much more difficult to conceive, how the

ERASMUS DARWIN, an English physician, poet, and botanist, was born at Elton, in 1731, and after taking his degree at Edinburgh, pursued his professional career at Lichfield, from which place he removed to Derby, where he died in 1802. Dr. DARWIN was an original thinker, a great adept in analogies, and an able versifier.

sight of a cottage should give us something of the same feeling as the sight of a peasant's family; and the aspect of a town raise many of the same ideas as the appearance of a multitude of persons. We may begin, therefore, with an example a little more complicated. Take, for instance, the case of a common English landscape-green meadows with grazing and ruminating cattle-canals or navigable rivers-well-fenced, well-cultivated fields-neat, clean, scattered cottages-humble antique churches, with church-yard elms, and crossing hedgerows,-all seen under bright skies, and in good weather.

2. There is much beauty, as every one will acknowledge, in such a scene. But in what does the beauty consist? Not certainly in the mere mixture of colors and forms; for colors more pleasing, and lines more graceful (according to any theory of grace that may be preferred), might be spread upon a board, or a painter's pallet, without engaging the eye to a second glance, or raising the least emotion in the mind: but in the picture of human happiness that is presented to our imaginations and affections; in the visible and unequivocal signs of comfort, and cheerful and peaceful enjoyment-and of that secure and successful in'dustry that insures its continuance-and of the piety by which it is exalted—and of the simplicity by which it is contrasted with the guilt and the fever of a city life; in the images of health, and temperance, and plenty which it exhibits to every eye; and in the glimpses which it affords to warmer imaginations, of those primitive or fabulous times, when man was uncorrupted by luxury and ambition, and of those humble retreats in which we still delight to imagine that love and philosophy may find an unpolluted asy'lum.

3. At all events, however, it is human feeling that excites our sympathy, and forms the true object of our emotions. It is man, and man alone, that we see in the beauties of the earth which he inhabits; or, if a more sensitive and extended sympa thy connect us with the lower families of animated nature, and make us rejoice with the lambs that bleat on the uplands, or the cattle that repose in the valley, or even with the living plants that drink the bright sun and the balmy air beside them, it is still the idea of enjoyment-of feelings that animate the existence of sentient beings-that calls forth all our emotions, and

is the parent of all the beauty with which we proceed to invest the inanimate creation around us.

4. Instead of this quiet and tame English landscape, let us now take a Welsh or a Highland scene, and see whether its beauties will admit of being explained on the same principle. Here, we shall have lofty mountains, and rocky and lonely recesses-tufted woods hung over precipices-lakes intersected with castled promontories-ample solitudes of unplowed and untrodden valleys-nameless and gigantic ruins-and mountain echoes repeating the scream of the eagle and the roar of the

cataract.

5. This, too, is beautiful, and, to those who can interpret the language it speaks, far more beautiful than the prosperous scene with which we have contrasted it. Yet, lonely as it is, it is to the recollection of man and the suggestion of human feelings that its beauty also is owing. The mere forms and colors that compose its visible appearance are no more capable of exciting any emotion in the mind than the forms and colors of a Turkey carpet. It is sympathy with the present or the past, or the imaginary inhabitants of such a region, that alone gives it either interest or beauty; and the delight of those who behold it will always be found to be in exact proportion to the force of their imaginations and the warmth of the social affections.

6. The leading impressions here are those of romantic seclusion and primeval simplicity; lovers sequestered in these blissful solitudes, "from towns and toils remote," and rustic poëts and philosophers communing with nature, and at a distance from the low pursuits and selfish malignity of ordinary mortals: then there is the sublime impression of the Mighty Powers which piled the massive cliffs upon each other, and rent the mountains asunder, and scattered their giant fragments at their base, and all the images connected with the monuments of ancient magnificence and extinguished hostility-the feuds, and the combats, and the triumphs of its wild and primitive inhabitants, contrasted with the stillness and desolation of the scenes where they lie interred; and the romantic ideas attached to their ancient traditions, and the peculiarities of the actual life of their descendants

their wild and enthusiastic poëtry-their gloomy superstitions -their attachment to their chiefs-the dangers, and the hard

ships, and enjoyments of their lonely huntings and fishingstheir pastoral shielings on the mountains in summer-and the tales and the sports that amuse the little groups that are frozen into their vast and trackless valleys in the winter.

7. Add to all this the traces of vast and obscure antiquity that are impressed on the language and the habits of the people, and on the cliffs, and caves, and gulfy torrents of the land; and the solemn and touching reflection, perpetually recurring, of the weakness and insignificance of perishable man, whose generations thus pass away into oblivion, with all their toils and ambition; while nature holds on her unvarying course, and pours out her streams, and renews her forests, with undecaying activity, regardless of the fate of her proud and perishable sovereign. JEFFREY.1

1.

H

149. KILIMANDJARO.

AIL to thee, monarch of African mountains,
Remote, inaccessible, silent, and lone-

Who, from the heart of the tropical fervors,
Liftest to heaven thine alien snows,

Feeding forever the fountains that make thee
Father of Nile and Creator of Egypt!

The years of the world are engraved on thy forehead;
Time's morning blush'd red on thy first-fallen snows;
Yet lost in the wilderness, nameless, unnoted,
Of Man unbeholden, thou wert not till now.

2. Knowledge alone is the being of Nature,
Giving a soul to her manifold features,
Lighting through paths of the primitive darkness
The footsteps of Truth and the vision of Song.
Knowledge has born thee anew to Creation,
And long-baffled Time at thy baptism rejoices.
Take, then, a name, and be fill'd with existence,
Yea, be exultant in sovereign' glory,
While from the hand of the wandering poet
Drops the first garland of song at thy feet.

'See Biographical Sketch, p. 287.- Sovereign (sův er in).

3. Floating alone, on the flood of thy making,
Through Africa's mystery, silence, and fire,
Lo! in my palm, like the Eastern enchanter,
I dip from the waters a magical mirror,
And thou art reveal'd to my purified vision.
I see thee, supreme in the midst of thy co-mates,
Standing alone 'twixt the Earth and the Heavens,
Heir of the Sunset and Herald of Morn.

Zone above zone, to thy shoulders of granite,
The climates of Earth are display'd, as an index.
Giving the scope of the Book of Creation.
4. There, in the gorges that widen, descending
Frem cloud and from cold into summer eternal,
Gather the threads of the ice-gender'd fountains--
Gather to riotous torrents of crystal,

And, giving each shelvy recess where they dally
The blooms of the North and its evergreen turfage,
Leap to the land of the lion and lotus!

There, in the wondering airs of the Tropics
Shivers the Aspen, still dreaming of cold:
There stretches the Oak, from the loftiest ledges,
His arms to the far-away lands of his brothers,
And the Pine-tree looks down on his rival the Palm.

5. Bathed in the tenderest purple of distance,

Tinted and shadow'd by pencils of air,

Thy battlements hang o'er the slopes and the forests,
Seats of the gods in the limitless ether,

Looming sublimely aloft and afar.

Above them, like folds of imperial ermine,

Sparkle the snow-fields that furrow thy forehead

Desolate realms, inaccessible, silent,

Chasms and caverns where Day is a stranger, Garners where storèth his treasures the Thunder, The Lightning his falchion, his arrows the Hail! 6. Sovereign Mountain, thy brothers give welcome : They, the baptized and the crowned of ages, Watch-towers of Continents, altars of Earth, Welcome thee now to their mighty assembly.