mission than that of the Prophet, and to be destined to overturn all tyrannies and superstitions on the earth, and to rescue all souls that believed in him. To shade the celestial radiance of his brow, he always wore a veil of silver gauze, and was at last attacked by the Caliph, and exterminated, with all his adherents. On this story, Mr Moore has engrafted a romantic and not very probable tale of two young lovers, Azim and Zelica; the former of whom having been supposed to perish in battle, the grief of the latter unsettles her understanding; and her distempered imagination is easily inflamed by the mystic promises of the Veiled Prophet, which at length prevail on her to join the troop of lovely priestesses who earn a blissful immortality in another world, by sharing his embraces upon earth. By what artful illusions the poor distracted maid was thus betrayed to her ruin, is not very satisfactorily explained; only we learn, that she and the Veiled Apostle descended into a charnel-house, and took a mutual oath, and drank blood together, in pledge of their eternal union. The prophet himself Mr Moore has represented as the most atrocious of all wretches, and instigated to his impious impostures, not so much by ambition, as by an insane and furious misanthropy, suggested, in part, by his consciousness of the hideous deformity of his visage, but inflamed, at last, into a diabolical hatred and scorn for human nature. At length Azim, who had not been slain, but made captive in battle, and who had wandered in Greece till he had imbibed the love of liberty that inspired her famous heroes of old-hears of the proud promises of emancipation which Mokanna (for that was the prophet's name) had held out to all nations, and comes to be enrolled among the champions of freedom and virtue. On the day of his presentment, the fallen Zelica sees him through the lattices of the hall; and the first sudden flash of joy and astonishment half restores her bewildered mind to a sense of her degradation and misery. In the mean time, Mokanna commands her attendance in private-tells her she must assist in seducing the warlike novice who had just joined their society, but seemed still too full of austerity for their purposes; and when she refuses the task, with expressions of agony and horror, addresses her, for the first time, in terms of undisguised profligacy and cruelty,—and at length lifts up the silver veil, and, with fiendish merriment, unmasks that dreadful countenance in which all horrors are assembled, and at the sight of which she falls senseless at his feet. Azim is next introduced into a scene of voluptuous splendour, where all the seductive influences of art and nature are in vain exerted to divert his thoughts from the love of Ze

lica and of Liberty. He breaks proudly away from these soft enchantments, and finds a mournful female figure before him, in whom he almost immediately recognises his long-lost and everloved Zelica. The first moment of their meeting is ecstasy on both sides; but the unhappy girl soon calls to mind the unutterable condition to which she is reduced-and, in agony, reveals to him the sad story of her derangement, and of the base advantages that had been taken of it. Azim at first throws her from him in abhorrence, but soon turns, in relenting pity, and offers at least to rescue her from this seat of pollution. She listens with eager joy to his proposal, and is about to fly with him in the instant, when the dread voice of Mokanna thunders in her ear her oath of eternal fidelity. That terrible sound brings back the frenzy of her soul. She throws her lover wildly from her, and vanishes at once, amidst the dazzling lights of that unholy palace. Azim then joins the approaching army of the Caliph, and leads on his forces against the impious usurper. Mokanna performs. prodigies of valour, but is always borne back by the superior force and enthusiasm of Azim. By vaunting words, however, and vain illusions, he contrives to maintain the confidence and courage of his followers, till their scanty remains are at length closely invested in the last of his cities. He then assembles them around him; tells them that the appointed hour of their triumph is at length arrived; and that that very night he will unveil to them that glorious brow, before the brightness of which, the force of his enemies shall be withered and overthrown in the morning. They are all invited accordingly to a sumptuous banquet, at the close of which he serves round to them cups drugged with deadly poison; and when it begins to operate, discloses to them, with bitter taunts and insults, the infernal countenance they had so long worshipped unseen. In the close of this scene of horror, he commands Zelica to be introduced,forces her to drink the last drop of the poison,-and then, after a speech of insane blasphemy, misanthropy, and desperation, plunges into a bath, of such corrosive quality, as instantly to extinguish life, and dissolve all the elements of the mortal frame. Zelica covers herself with the fatal veil, and totters out to the ramparts, where, being mistaken for Mokanna, she rushes upon the spear of her Azim, and receives his forgiveness in death. He survives, to pass the rest of his life in continual prayer and supplication for her erring spirit; and dies at last upon her grave, in the full assurance of rejoining her in purity and bliss.

It is needless to enlarge on the particular faults of this story, after the general observations we hazarded at the outset. The

character of Mokanna, as well as his power and influence, is a mere distortion and extravagance: But the great blemish is the corruption of Zelica, and the insanity so gratuitously alleged by the poet in excuse of it. Nothing less, indeed, would in any way account for such a catastrophe; and, after all, it is painful and offensive to the imagination. But we really have nothing but the poet's word for the existence of this infirmity: for, except in the agony in which she breaks away from Azim, she conducts herself with perfect composure and consistency throughout. Indeed, the very supremacy she exercises in the Haram, and her selection to conduct a scheme of artful seduction, are irreconcileable with the idea of habitual frenzy. The bridal oath, pledged with blood among the festering bodies of the dead, is one of the overstrained theatrical horrors of the German school; and a great deal of the theorizing and argumentation which is intended to palliate or conceal those defects, is obscure and incomprehensible. Rich as it is, in short, in fancy and expression, and powerful in some of the scenes of passion, we should have had great doubts of the success of this volume, if it had all been of the same texture with the poem of which we are speaking. Yet, even there, there is a charm, almost irresistible, in the volume of sweet sounds and beautiful images, which are heaped together with luxurious profusion in the general texture of the style, and invest even the absurdities of the story with the graceful amplitude of their rich and figured veil. What, for instance, can be sweeter than this account of Azim's entry into this earthly paradise of temptations?

Meanwhile, through vast illuminated halls,

Silent and bright, where nothing but the falls
Of fragrant waters, gushing with cool sound
From many a jasper fount is heard around,
Young AZIM roams bewilder'd,-nor can gues
What means this maze of light and loneliness.
Here, the way leads, o'er tesselated floors
Or mats of CAIRO, through long corridors,
Where, rang'd in cassolets and silver urns,
Sweet wood of aloe or of sandal burns;
And spicy rods, such as illume at night
The bowers of TIBET, send forth odorous light,
Like Peris' wands, when pointing out the road
For some pure Spirit to its blest abode !-
And here, at once, the glittering saloon

Bursts on his sight, boundless and bright as noon;
Where, in the midst, reflecting back the rays
In broken rainbows, a fresh fountain plays
High as the enamell'd cupola, which towers
All rich with Arabesques of gold and flowers:

And the mosaic floor beneath shines through
The sprinkling of that fountain's silvery dew,
Like the wet, glistening shells, of every dye,
That on the margin of the Red Sea lie.

Here too he traces the kind visitings
Of woman's love in those fair, living things
Of land and wave, whose fate-in bondage thrown
For their weak loveliness-is like her own!
On one side gleaming with a sudden grace
Through water, brilliant as the crystal vase
In which it undulates, small fishes shine,
Like golden ingots from a fairy mine;-
While, on the other, lattic'd lightly in
With odoriferous woods of COMORIN,
Each brilliant bird that wings the air is seen;—
Gay, sparkling loories, such as gleam between
The crimson blossoms of the coral tree
In the warm isles of India's sunny sea:
Mecca's blue sacred pigeon, and the thrush
Of Hindostan, whose holy warblings gush,
At evening, from the tall pagoda's top ;-
Those golden birds that, in the spice-time, drop
About the gardens, drunk with that sweet food
Whose scent hath lur'd them o'er the summer flood;-
And those that under ARABY's soft sun

Build their high nests of budding cinnamon.' p. 53–56. The warrior youth looks round at first with disdain upon those seductions with which he supposes the sage prophet wishes to try the firmness of his votaries.

So thought the youth;-but, ev'n while he defied

This witching scene, he felt its witchery glide
Through every sense. The perfume, breathing round,
Like a pervading spirit ;-the still sound

Of falling waters, lulling as the song

Of Indian bees at sunset, when they throng
Around the fragrant NILICA, and deep
In its blue blossoms hum themselves to sleep!
And music too-dear music! that can touch
Beyond all else the soul that loves it much-
Now heard far off, so far as but to seem
Like the faint, exquisite music of a dream ;-~
All was too much for him, too full of bliss,
The heart could nothing feel, that felt not this;
Soften'd he sunk upon a couch, and gave
His soul up to sweet thoughts, like wave on wave
Succeeding in smooth seas, when storms are laid;—
He thought of ZELICA, his own dear maid,

And of the time when, full of blissful sighs,
They sat and look'd into each other's eyes,
Silent and happy-as if God had given
Nought else worth looking at on this side heaven!
While thus he thinks, still nearer on the breeze
Come those delicious, dream-like harmonies,
Each note of which but adds new, downy links
To the soft chain in which his spirit sinks.
He turns him tow'rd the sound, and, far away
Through a long vista, sparkling with the play
Of countless lamps,-like the rich track which Day
Leaves on the waters, when he sinks from us;
So long the path, its light so tremulous ;-
He sees a groupe of female forms advance,
Some chain'd together in the mazy dance
By fetters, forg'd in the green sunny bowers,
As they were captives to the King of Flowers,' &c.
Awhile they dance before him, then divide,
Breaking, like rosy clouds at even-tide
Around the rich pavilion of the sun,-
Till silently dispersing, one by one,

Through many a path that from the chamber leads
To gardens, terraces, and moonlight meads,
Their distant laughter comes upon the wind,
And but one trembling nymph remains behind,
Beck'ning them back in vain, for they are gone,
And she is left in all that light alone;
No veil to curtain o'er her beauteous brow,
In its young bashfulness more beauteous now;
But a light, golden chain-work round her hair
Such as the maids of YEZD and SHIRAZ wear,
From which, on either side, gracefully hung
A golden amulet, in the' Arab tongue,
Engraven o'er with some immortal line
From holy writ, or bard scarce less divine;
While her left hand, as shrinkingly she stood,
Held a small lute of gold and sandal-wood,

Which, once or twice, she touch'd with hurried strain,
Then took her trembling fingers off again.

But when at length a timid glance she stole

At AZIM, the sweet gravity of soul

She saw through all his features calm'd her fear,

And, like a half-tam'd antelope, more near,

Though shrinking still, she came ;-then sat her down Upon a musnud's edge, and, bolder grown,

In the pathetic mode of ISPAHAN

Touch'd a preluding strain, and thus began :