Her arms are round her lover now,

His livid cheek to hers she presses,
And dips, to bind his burning brow,

In the cool lake her loosen'd tresses.
Ah! once, how little did he think

An hour would come, when he should shrink
With horror from that dear embrace,

Those gentle arms, that were to him
Holy as is the cradling place

Of Eden's infant cherubim!
And now he yields

- now turns away,

Shuddering as if the venom lay

All in those proffer'd lips alone-
Those lips that, then so fearless grown,
Never until that instant came

Near his unask'd or without shame.
"Oh! let me only breathe the air,

The blessed air, that's breath'd by thee,
And, whether on its wings it bear
Healing or death, 'tis sweet to me!
There, -drink my tears, while yet they fall, -
Would that my bosom's blood were balm,
And, well thou know'st, I'd shed it all,
To give thy brow one minute's calm.
Nay, turn not from me that dear face
Am I not thine - - thy own lov'd bride
The one, the chosen one, whose place,
In life or death is by thy side!
Think'st thou that she, whose only light,

In this dim world, from thee hath shone,
Could bear the long, the cheerless night,
That must be hers, when thou art gone?
That I can live, and let thee go,
Who art my life itself? No, no-
When the stem dies, the leaf that grew
Out of its heart must perish too!
Then turn to me, my own love, turn,
Before like thee I fade and burn;
Cling to these yet cool lips, and share
The last pure life that lingers there!"
She fails she sinks as dies the lamp
In charnel airs or cavern-damp,

So quickly do his baleful sighs

Quench all the sweet light of her eyes!

One struggle and his pain is past

Her lover is no longer living!

One kiss the maiden gives, one last,

Long kiss, which she expires in giving!'

This, too, fails! The story now becomes very interesting; and we are reminded of all the agitation of our youthful fancies, when we listened to the wild but heart-touching tales

of

of Oriental invention. Here, with true delight, we can compare the author, in some of his happiest passages, to the best poets of our country; and we can say, with perfect justice, that Goldsmith himself never expressed a more sweetly natural stanza (if it may be called by so dignified a name) than these four lines:

'Tis shefar off, through moonlight dim,

He knows his own betrothed bride;
She, who would rather die with him,

Than live to gain the world beside.'

Yet, notwithstanding all this sincerity, and self-devotedness, and excessive attraction, the spell is insufficient, and the Peri is again rejected from Paradise. Our readers will surely be anxious to know what can procure the pardon of the exiled wanderer. They shall be relieved from their anxiety; and, in their relief, they shall find supreme delight. The Peri flies away towards the temple of the sun at Balbec,- towards the sublimest shrine of the most beautiful of all superstitions: Cheer'd by this hope she bends her thither ; Still laughs the radiant eye of Heaven, Nor have the golden bowers of Even In the rich West begun to wither; When, o'er the vale of BALBEC winging Slowly, she sees a child at play, Among the rosy wild-flowers singing, As rosy and as wild as they; Chacing, with eager hands and eyes, The beautiful blue damsel-flies,

That flutter'd round the jasmine stems,
Like winged flowers or flying gems:
And, near the boy, who tir'd with play
Now nestling 'mid the roses lay,
She saw a wearied man dismount

From his hot steed, and on the brink
Of a small imaret's rustic fount
Impatient fling him down to drink.
Then swift his haggard brow he turn'd
To the fair child, who fearless sat,
Though never yet hath day-beam burn'd
Upon a brow more fierce than that,
Sullenly fierce-a mixture dire,
Like thunder-clouds, of gloom and fire!
In which the PERI's eye could read
Dark tales of many a ruthless deed;
The ruin'd maid the shrine profan'd
Oaths broken - and the threshold stain'd
With blood of guests!-there written, all,
Black as the damning drops that fall
From the denouncing Angel's pen,

Ere Mercy weeps them out again!

< Yet

Yet tranquil now that man of crime,
(As if the balmy evening time
Soften'd his spirit,) look'd and lay,
Watching the rosy infant's play :-
Though still, whene'er his eye by chance
Fell on the boy's, its lurid glance
Met that unclouded, joyous gaze,
As torches, that have burnt all night
Through some impure and godless rite,
Encounter morning's glorious rays.

• But hark! the vesper-call to prayer,
As slow the orb of day-light sets,
Is rising sweetly on the air,

From SYRIA's thousand minarets!
The boy has started from the bed
Of flowers, where he had laid his head,
And down upon the fragrant sod

Kneels with his forehead to the south,
Lisping th' eternal name of God

From purity's own cherub mouth,
And looking, while his hands and eyes
Are lifted to the glowing skies,

Like a stray babe of Paradise,

Just lighted on that flowery plain,

And seeking for its home again!

Oh 'twas a sight that Heav'n-that Child

A scene, which might have well beguil'd

Ev'n haughty EBLIS of a sigh

For glories lost and peace gone by!

And how felt he, the wretched Man

-

Reclining there while memory ran
O'er many a year of guilt and strife,
Flew o'er the dark flood of his life,
Nor found one sunny resting-place,
Nor brought him back one branch of grace!
"There was a time," he said, in mild,
Heart-humbled tones, "thou blessed child!
When young and haply pure as thou,
I look'd and pray'd like thee - but now
He hung his head each nobler aim

And hope and feeling, which had slept
From boyhood's hour, that instant came
Fresh o'er him, and he wept- he wept !

Blest tears of soul-felt penitence!
In whose benign, redeeming flow

Is felt the first, the only sense

Of guiltless joy that guilt can know.'

We confess that we love, as well as admire, the feeling and the fancy of this virtuous and exquisite description. It has REV. JULY, 1817.

U

been

been a theory of our earliest days, and it has not been con− travened by the observation of our riper age, that one of the best employments of the very youthful intellect is the perusak of fairy-tales! "Hush-hush,"- we hear a whole host of greybeard objectors, male and female, shrieking out their horror at so uncalvinistic an idea! "What! fairy-tales ! which have no moral - no religion -- no meaning whatever!". 66 - My good Lady Riggledum," listen one moment to what we have to urge in defence of our opinion. Through the imagination only the heart of youth is to be reached: the imagination stands, as a sort of centinel, at the vestibule of the human mind, and admits or rejects any visitors that she chuses. What wise person, then, who knows the effect of bribing the porter, of giving vails to the guardian of the very inlet of the mansion, would hesitate to enlist the imagination in his service; to make the fancy the direct channel to the heart; and endeavour in future, as opportunity might occur and judicious choice decide, to fasten and to fix the ideas, so introduced, on the calm and calculating understanding?

"As fancy opens the quick springs of sense." Pope. However this may be; whether our metaphysics be right or wrong; we are sure that in Mr. Moore's present poem he has had a great moral object, and this infinitely more than compensates for any inferiority in conception or manner that may be observed in Paradise and the Peri,' when compared with the Veiled Prophet.' It is impossible for any object to be nobler than the praise of penitence; than the encouragement and the exaltation of the timid and the despondent,

to

"View their own heav'n, and vindicate their birth.” We come next to ، the Fire Worshippers. There is a species of poem which is entirely the growth of our own times; and we have often characterized it, in reviewing Mr. Scott's productions, (the first successful compositions in this novel manner,) as a sort of lengthened ballad, an attempt at varying and dignifying the Chevy-Chase style of our remoter ancestors. The modern metrical romance, as managed by our northern minstrel, is certainly little more than an amplification and an exaltation of the rude efforts of the earliest age of our national poetry. Within this limited circle, (a circle exclusively confined to a particular range of characters, manners, scenes, situations, and, we may even add, ideas,) the effect produced by the poet in question has been prodigious; and, allowing for the gross and now generally acknowleged defects of his phraseology and versification, with instances of which, se

lected

lected from all his writings, our unwilling censures have abounded, — still great indeed has been the pleasure conferred on a most numerous class of English readers, by such works as the Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, &c. In the same track certainly, (with the exception of Childe Harold, and of his Satirical Poems,) but with a large increase of vigour and variety, Lord Byron has followed: but, far from binding his hearers down to Border-quarrels or Highland-histories, he has carried them over an ampler theatre of natural and moral description. He has dived perhaps deeper into the recesses of human depravity, and has wandered more widely in pursuit of the vagaries of human caprice: but we have still a thousand points of contact ; the like interest excited for bold unprincipled characters; the like veil of glory, and panoply of courage, thrown over selfishness, dishonesty, and cruelty. What are the Marmion and the Bertram of our own country but the Giaour and Corsair of other climes, warmed to higher atrocity either by the more daring imagination of their poet or by the land of their birth? That the moral, or rather immoral, result of adorning such beings with interesting attributes, of not only failing to hold them up to detestation, but describing them as the lords and masters of the hearts of lovely and amiable women, that the result of this system, on the male and female population of the day, must have been considerable, no person blest with a ray of reflection can possibly doubt. If, then, it really is a matter of importance what species of human being a popular poet endeavours to recommend to the interest and the attachment, even the momentary and partial attachment, of his readers, how shall we too strongly reprobate the prevalent practice of offering none but faulty, radically faulty, characters to our primary attention? In almost every popular poem of the day, epic, or dramatic, or insignificant, the true hero, the real object of interest, is a scoundrel, and the heroine a

"something more

Than decency will suffer us to say."

When this is the case, criticism cannot endure to descend to longer parley with the minor blemishes of barbarism or discord, which may deface the grammar or perplex the rhythm of these irregular productions. It may regret, indeed, to see the metre of Gay's Fables, the octosyllabic verse, raised into the disproportionate consequence of a vehicle for lofty passions and agitating events; and it has this regret to express, but most thankful is criticism to Mr. Moore that he has enabled her to acknowlege that this is the only regret to be felt,