And as youth counts the shining links
That time around him binds so fast,
Pleased with the task, he little thinks
How hard that chain will press at last.

Vain was the man, and false as vain,
Who said, 'Were he ordained to run
His long career of life again,

He would do all that he had done.'
Ah! 'tis not thus the voice that dwells
In sober birthdays speaks to me ;
Far otherwise-of time it tells

Lavished unwisely, carelessly;
Of counsel mocked; of talents made
Haply for high and pure designs,
But oft, like Israel's incense, laid
Upon unholy, earthly shrines;
Of nursing many a wrong desire;
Of wandering after Love too far,
And taking every meteor fire

That crossed my pathway for his star!
All this it tells, and could I trace

The imperfect picture o'er again, With power to add, retouch, efface

The lights and shades, the joy and pain, How little of the past would stay! How quickly all should melt away

All-but that freedom of the mind

Which hath been more than wealth to me; Those friendships in my boyhood twined, And kept till now unchangingly ;

And that dear home, that saving ark

Where Love's true light at last I've found, Cheering within when all grows dark

And comfortless and stormy round.

CHARLES WOLFE

THE world is often spoken of as dull and blind to true excellence. It is a shallow view. Humanity bristles with sensitive tentacles which rarely fail to grasp and draw in anything that will nourish it, even if they sometimes, for a time, lay hold of things useless and unwholesome. Even thus the world's tentacles get hold of things, like the Discourses of Epictetus or the RELIGIO MEDICI, that never were intended for publicity, nor do they fail to search out minuter things too. The Rev. Charles Wolfe, an obscure Irish clergyman, writes a short poem which a friend who had learned it recites to a casual travelling acquaintance. The latter publishes it in the Newry Telegraph. Soon it is on the lips of Shelley and Byron, and now there is hardly a reader of the English language who has not read the Burial of Sir John Moore.' Few indeed are the 'occasional' poems that possess so enduring a power to move the heart. Its note of pride and sorrow is tuned to that of all the lofty sorrows of the world, and the very music of the lines, with their long, deep vowel sounds, like the burst of solemn passion in Beethoven's Funeral March, will carry their meaning and emotion to readers of many generations hence.

Wolfe wrote but little poetry in his short life, and little of what he wrote can compare with the Burial Ode.' But the 'Song' which he wrote under the influence of a strain of Irish music, to which he was keenly sensitive, has a remarkable intensity of feeling and sweetness of melody. He had a keen affection for his native land and all that it produced, and though a descendant of the dominant class, and what we should now call an Imperialist, he could write lines like the following from his long poem on 'Patriotism':

O Erin! O my mother! I will love thee!
Whether upon thy green Atlantic throne
Thou sitt'st august, majestic and sublime;

Or on thy empire's last remaining fragment
Bendest forlorn, dejected and forsaken,——

Thy smiles, thy tears, thy blessings and thy woes,
Thy glory and thy infamy, be mine!

The selection here given includes one poem- a sonnetnot previously printed. It is taken from a manuscript insertion bound up in a volume of the LIFE AND REMAINS OF THE REV. C. WOLFE (third edition, 1827) which was purchased in a second-hand bookshop in Dublin in 1888. The volume has also bound up with it a leaf from Bentley's Magazine, vol. v., containing a German version of the ‘Burial Ode,' and a copy of a note from Mr. Edmund Gosse in Ward's ENGLISH POETS, vol. iv. (1880), on the history of the Ode. After these come two quarto leaves of older paper, and written in a quite different and evidently earlier handwriting. They contain three hitherto unknown pieces alleged to be by Wolfe. The first is entitled 'The Contrast: Lines written by the Rev. C. Wolfe while standing under Windsor Terrace.' It is a poem on George III., reading like a hasty impromptu sketch of what might have been made a powerful piece of verse. I may quote two stanzas:

We have fought the fight. From his lofty throne

The foe to our land we tumbled,

And it gladdened each heart, save his alone

For whom that foe was humbled :
His silver beard o'er a bosom spread
Unvaried by life's emotion,

Like a yearly lengthening snowdrift spread
On the calm of a frozen ocean.

Still o'er him Oblivion's waters lay,

Though the tide of life kept flowing ;
When they spoke of the King, 'twas but to say,

'The old man's strength is going.'

At intervals thus the waves disgorge,

By weakness rent asunder,

A piece of the wreck of the Royal George,'

For the people's pity and wonder.

Then comes the sonnet given below, and finally a poem

On hearing The Last Rose of Summer'-a melody on which Wolfe wrote a prose story now extant. The last stanza runs :

Sweet mourner, cease that melting strain,

Too well it suits the grave's cold slumbers;
Too well-the heart that loved in vain
Breathes, lives, and weeps in those wild numbers.
T. W. ROLLESTON.

Charles Wolfe was the son of Theobald Wolfe, a landowner of the County Kildare, of the same family as the hero of Quebec, now represented by Richard Wolfe, Esq., of Forenaghts, County Kildare. One of Theobald Wolfe's tenants was Peter Tone, a coachmaker of Dublin, who called his eldest son after his landlord Theobald Wolfe-and thus caused the name to be written deep in Irish history. Charles Wolfe was born in 1791, and was educated at Winchester, and Trinity College, Dublin, where he was distinguished for high intellectual attainments and successes. He took orders in 1817 (the year in which the Burial Ode' was published), and held curacies at Drumclog and Castle Caulfield, County Tyrone. He was intensely beloved by all conditions of people among his flock, for whom he ruined his weak constitution in devoted work. He died of consumption in 1823, after a vain attempt to restore his health by a voyage to France. His LIFE AND REMAINS have been published (1825) by the Rev. Archdeacon Russell.

THE BURIAL OF SIR JOHN MOORE

I

NOT a drum was heard, not a funeral note.
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O'er the grave where our hero we buried.

We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning;
By the struggling moonbeam's misty light,
And the lantern dimly burning.

III

No useless coffin enclosed his breast,

Not in sheet or in shroud we wound him
But he lay like a warrior taking his rest,
With his martial cloak around him.

IV

Few and short were the prayers we said,

And we spoke not a word of sorrow;
But we steadfastly gazed on the face that was dead,
And we bitterly thought of the morrow.

We thought, as we hollow'd his narrow bed,

And smooth'd down his lonely pillow,

That the foe and the stranger would tread o'er his head,
And we far away on the billow!

VI.

Lightly they'll talk of the spirit that's gone.
And o'er his cold ashes upbraid him ;
But little he'll reck, if they let him sleep on
In the grave where a Briton has laid him.

VII

But half of our heavy task was done

When the clock struck the hour for retiring, And we heard the distant and random gun That the foe was sullenly firing.

VIII

Slowly and sadly we laid him down

From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone—
But we left him alone with his glory!

SONNET WRITTEN DURING HIS RESIDENCE IN COLLEGE

My spirit's on the mountains, where the birds

In wild and sportive freedom wing the air,

Amidst the heath-flowers and the browsing herds,
Where Nature's altar is, my spirit's there.

It is my joy to tread the pathless hills,
Though but in fancy-for my mind is free,
And walks by sedgy ways and trickling rills,
While I'm forbid the use of liberty.