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Like a high-born maiden
In a palace tower,
Soothing her love-laden

Soul in secret hour

With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower??

Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden

Its aërial hue

Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view.

Like a rose embowered

In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives

Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves.

Sound of vernal showers

On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,

All that ever was

Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.

Teach me, sprite or bird,

What sweet thoughts are thine:

I have never heard

Praise of love or wine

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus hymeneal,

Or triumphal chant,

Matched with thine would be all

But an empty vaunt

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want,

What objects are the fountains

Of thy happy strain?

What fields, or waves, or mountains?

What shapes of sky or plain?

What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

With thy clear keen joyance

Langour cannot be :

Shadow of annoyance

Never came near thee:

Thou lovest; but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

THE SKYLARK.

Waking or asleep,

Thou of death must deem

Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream,

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn

Hate, and pride, and fear;

If we were things born

Not to shed a tear,

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near,

Better than all measures

Of delightful sound,

Better than all treasures
That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were,

thou scorner of the ground!"

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Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow,

The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

1. "Shelley chose the measure of this poem with great felicity. The earnest hurry of the four short lines, followed by the long effusiveness of the Alexandrine, expresses the eagerness and continuity of the lark."-Leigh Hunt.

"Shelley's Skylark is perfectly buoyant with the very music it commemorates."-Tuckerman.

"The ode to the Skylark is the very warbling of the triumphant bird."Shaw.

2. "The music of the whole stanza is of the loveliest sweetness; of energy in the midst of softness; of dulcitude and variety. Not a sound of a vowel in the quatrain resembles that of another, except in the rhymes; while the very

SHELLEY.

sameness or repetition of the sounds in the Alexandrine intimates the revolvement and continuity of the music which the lady is playing, observe, for instance, (for nothing is too minute to dwell upon in such beauty), the contrast of the i and o in high-born'; the difference of the a in maiden' from that in palace' the strong opposition of maiden to tower (making the rhyme more vigorous in proportion to the general softness); then the new differences in soothing, love-laden, soul, and secret, all diverse from one another, and from the whole strain; and finally, the strain itself, winding up in the Alexandrine with a cadence of particular repetitions, which constitutes nevertheless a new difference on that account

The music is carried on into the first two lines of the next stanza :

Like a glow-worm golden

In a dell of dew;

A melody as happy in its alliteration as in what may be termed its counterpoint. And the colouring of this stanza

is as beautiful as the music."-Leigh Hunt.

3. "A most noble and emphatic close of the stanza. Not that the lark, in any vulgar sense of the word, scorns' the ground, for he dwells upon it; but that, like the poet, nobody can take leave of common-places with more heavenly triumph."-Leigh Hunt.

XV. THE SOLDIER'S DREAM.

"IF ever household affections and loves are graceful things, they are graceful in the poor. The ties that bind the wealthy and the proud to home may be forged on earth, but those which link the poor man to his humble hearth are of the true metal, and bear the stamp of heaven. The man of high descent may love the halls and lands of his inheritance as a part of himself, as trophies of his birth and power; the poor man's attachment to the tenement he holds, which strangers have held before, and may to-morrow occupy again, has a worthier root, struck deep into a purer soil. His household gods are of flesh and blood, with no alloy of silver, gold, or precious stones; he has no property but in the affections of his own heart; and when they endear bare floors and walls, despite of rags and toil, and scanty meals, that man has his love of home from God, and his rude hut becomes a golemn place."—Dickens.

OUR bugles sang truce, for the night-cloud had lowered,
And the sentinel stars set their watch in the sky;
And thousands had sunk on the ground overpowered,
The weary to sleep, and the wounded to die.

When reposing that night on my pallet of straw,
By the wolf-scaring fagot that guarded the slain,
At the dead of the night a sweet vision I saw,

And thrice ere the morning I dreamt it again.
Methought from the battle-field's dreadful array,
Far, far I had roamed on a desolate track:
'Twas autumn,-and sunshine arose on the way
To the home of my fathers, that welcomed me back.

I flew to the pleasant fields traversed so oft

In life's morning march when my bosom was young; I heard my own mountain-goats bleating aloft,

And knew the sweet strain that the corn-reapers sung.

Then pledged we the wine-cup, and fondly I swore
From my home and my weeping friends never to part:
My little ones kissed me a thousand times o'er,

And

my

wife sobbed aloud in her fulness of heart.

NIGHT.

Stay, stay with us,-rest, thou art weary and worn ;
And fain was the war-broken soldier to stay;
But sorrow returned with the dawning of morn,
And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away.

283

CAMPBELL.

XVI. NIGHT.

"IF the relation of sleep to-night, and, in some instances, its converse, be real, we cannot reflect without amazement upon the extent to which it carries us. Day and night are things close to us; the change applies immediately to our sensations; of all the phenomena of nature, it is the most obvious and the most familiar to our experience; but, in its cause, it belongs to the great motions which are passing in the heavens. Whilst the earth glides round her axle, she ministers to the alternate necessities of the animals dwelling upon her surface, at the same time that she obeys the influence of those attractions which regulate the order of many thousand worlds. The relation, therefore, of sleep to-night, is the relation of the inhabitants of the earth to the rotation of their globe; probably it is more; it is a relation to the system of which that globe is a part; and, still farther, to the congregation of systems of which theirs is only one. If this account be true, it connects the meanest individual with the universe itself; a chicken roosting upon its perch, with the spheres revolving in the firmament."-Paley.

-

NIGHT is the time for rest ;-
How sweet when labours close,

To gather round an aching breast

The curtain of repose,

Stretch the tired limbs, and lay the head

Down on our own delightful bed!

Night is the time for dreams;

The gay romance of life,

When truth that is, and truth that seems

Mix in fantastic strife;

Ah! visions less beguiling far

Than waking dreams by daylight are!

Night is the time for toil ;-
To plough the classic field,
Intent to find the buried spoil
Its wealthy furrows yield;
Till all is ours that sages taught,
That poets sung and heroes wrought.

Night is the time to weep ;

To wet with unseen tears

Those graves of memory, where sleep
The joys of other years;

Hopes that were angels at their birth,
But died when young like things of earth.

Night is the time to watch;
O'er ocean's dark expanse,
To hail the Pleiades, or catch
The full moon's earliest glance
That brings into the home-sick mind
All we have loved and left behind.

Night is the time for care;
Brooding on hours misspent,
To see the spectre of Despair
Come to our lonely tent;

Like Brutus midst his slumbering host,
Summoned to die by Cæsar's ghost.

Night is the time to think;-
When, from the eye, the soul

Takes flight, and on the utmost brink
Of yonder starry pole,

Discerns beyond the abyss of night

The dawn of uncreated light.

Night is the time to pray;

Our Saviour oft withdrew

To desert mountains far away;

So will his followers do,

Steal from the throug to haunts untrod,

And commune there alone with God.

Night is the time for death ;

When all around is peace,

Calmly to yield the weary breath,

From sin and suffering cease,

Think of heaven's bliss, and give the sign

To parting friends;-that death be mine.

JAMES MONTGOMERY,

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