POET.

What think I now? Even what I thought before;boasts though may deplore,

What

Still I repeat, words lead me not astray

When the shown feeling points a different way. can say grace at slander's feast,

Smooth

And bless each haut-gout cook'd by monk or priest;
Leaves the full lie on 's gong to swell,
Content with half-truths that do just as well;
But duly decks his mitred comrade's flanks,
And with him shares the Irish nation's thanks!

So much for you, my friend! who own a Church, And would not leave your mother in the lurch! But when a Liberal asks me what I think— Scared by the blood and soot of Cobbett's ink, And Jeffrey's glairy phlegm and Connor's foam, In search of some safe parable I roamAn emblem sometimes may comprise a tome!

Disclaimant of his uncaught grandsire's mood, I see a tiger lapping kitten's food:

And who shall blame him that he purs applause,
When brother Brindle pleads the good old cause;
And frisks his pretty tail, and half unsheathes his
claws!

Yet not the less, for modern lights unapt,
I trust the bolts and cross-bars of the laws
More than the Protestant milk all newly lapt,
Impearling a tame wild-cat's whisker'd jaws !

LINES

TO A COMIC AUTHOR, ON AN ABUSIVE REVIEW.

WHAT though the chilly wide-mouth'd quacking

chorus

From the rank swamps of murk Review-land croak:
So was it, neighbour, in the times before us,
When Momus, throwing on his Attic cloak,
Romp'd with the Graces; and each tickled Muse
(That Turk, Dan Phoebus, whom bards call divine,
Was married to at least, he kept-all nine)
Fled, but still with reverted faces ran;
Yet, somewhat the broad freedoms to excuse,
They had allured the audacious Greek to use,
Swore they mistook him for their own good man.
This Momus-Aristophanes on earth

Men call'd him-maugre all his wit and worth,
Was croak'd and gabbled at. How, then, should you,
Or I, friend, hope to 'scape the skulking crew?
No! laugh, and say aloud, in tones of glee,
"I hate the quacking tribe, and they hate me!"

CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL OBJECT. SINCE all that beat about in Nature's range,

Or veer or vanish; why shouldst thou remain The only constant in a world of change, O yearning thought! that livest but in the brain? Call to the hours, that in the distance play,

The faery people of the future day-
Fond thought! not one of all that shining swarm
Will breathe on thee with life-enkindling breath,
Till when, like strangers sheltering from a storm,
Hope and Despair meet in the porch of Death!
Yet still thou haunt'st me; and though well I see,
She is not thou, and only thou art she,

Still, still as though some dear embodied good,
Some living love before my eyes there stood
With answering look a ready ear to lend,

66

I mourn to thee and say—" Ah! loveliest friend!
That this the meed of all my toils might be,
To have a home, an English home, and thee!"
Vain repetition! Home and thou are one.
The peacefull'st cot the moon shall shine upon,
Lull'd by the thrush and waken'd by the lark,
Without thee were but a becalmed bark,
Whose helmsman on an ocean waste and wide
Sits mute and pale his mouldering helm beside.
And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when
The woodman winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, where o'er the sheep-track's maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glistening haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image* with a glory round its head;
The enamour'd rustic worships its fair hues,
Nor knows he makes the shadow he pursues !

* This phenomenon, which the author has himself experienced, and of which the reader may find a description in one of the earlier volumes of the Manchester Philosophical Trans

MODERN CRITICS.*

NO private grudge they need, no personal spite : The viva sectio is its own delight!

All enmity, all envy, they disclaim,

Disinterested thieves of our good name:
Cool, sober murderers of their neighbours' fame!

THE poet in his lone yet genial hour
Gives to his eye a magnifying power:

Or rather he emancipates his eyes

From the black shapeless accidents of size-
In unctuous cones of kindling coal,

Or smoke upwreathing from the pipe's trim bole,
His gifted ken can see
Phantoms of sublimity. †

actions, is applied figuratively in the following passage of the Aids to Reflection (p. 220):~

"Pindar's fine remark respecting the different effects of music, on different characters, holds equally true of Genius; as many as are not delighted by it are disturbed, perplexed, irritated. The beholder either recognises it as a projected form of his own being, that moves before him with a glory round its head, or recoils from it as a spectre."

* Biographia Literaria (Lond. 1817.), vol. ii. p. 118.

Historie and Gests of Maxilian, Blackwood's Magazine, January, 1822.

INSCRIPTION FOR A TIME-PIECE.*

NOW! it is gone. Our brief hours travel post, Each with its thought or deed, its Why or

How:

But know, each parting hour gives up a ghost
To dwell within thee-an eternal now!

1830.

FANCY IN NUBIBUS:

OR THE POET IN THE CLOUDS.

A Sonnet composed on the Sea-Coast.*

O! IT is pleasant, with a heart at ease,
Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies,

To make the shifting clouds be what you please,
Or let the easily persuaded eyes

Own each quaint likeness issuing from the mould Of a friend's fancy; or with head bent low And cheek aslant see rivers flow of gold

'Twixt crimson banks; and then, a traveller, go From mount to mount through Cloudland, gorgeous land!

Or listening to the tide, with closed sight, Be that blind bard, who on the Chian strand

By those deep sounds possess'd with inward light, Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee

Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea.

* Printed at the end of Specimens of the Table-talk of S.T.C. Lond. 1835, ii. 360.

+ Blackwood's Magazine, November, 1819.