sion of which he declares would be more than an adequate reward for the rarest virtue, to the remark, "Surely, he who has described it so well must have possessed it?" replies, "If he were worthy to have possessed it, and had believingly anticipated and not found it, how bitter the disappointment!" and then, after a pause, breaks out into verse thus :—

Yes, yes! that boon, life's richest treat,
He had, or fancied that he had;
Say, 'twas but in his own conceit-

The fancy made him glad!

Crown of his cup, and garnish of his dish,
The boon prefigured in his earliest wish,
The fair fulfilment of his poesy,

When his young heart first yearned for sympathy!

But e'en the meteor offspring of the brain

Unnourished wane;

Faith asks her daily bread,

And fancy must be fed.

Now so it chanced-from wet or dry,
It boots not how-I know not why-
She missed her wonted food; and quickly
Poor fancy staggered and grew sickly.

Then came a restless state, 'twixt yea and nay,
His faith was fixed, his heart all ebb and flow;
Or like a bark, in some half-sheltered bay,
Above its anchor driving to and fro.

That boon, which but to have possest
In a belief, gave life a zest―
Uncertain both what it had been,
And if by error lost, or luck;
And what it was;-an evergreen
Which some insidious blight had struck,
Or annual flower, which, past its blow,
No vernal spell shall e'er revive!
Uncertain, and afraid to know,

Doubts tossed him to and fro :.
Hope keeping Love, Love, Hope, alive,
Like babes bewildered in the snow,

That cling and huddle from the cold
In hollow tree or ruined fold.

Those sparkling colours, once his boast,
Fading, one by one away,

Thin, and hueless as a ghost,

Poor fancy on her sick-bed lay;
Ill at a distance, worse when near,
Telling her dreams to jealous fear!
Where was it then, the sociable sprite
That crowned the poet's cup and decked his dish!
Poor shadow cast from an unsteady wish,
Itself a substance by no other right
But that it intercepted reason's light;
It dimmed his eye, it darkened on his brow,
A peevish mood, a tedious time, I trow!
Thank heaven! 'tis not so now.

O bliss of blissful hours!

The boon of heaven's decreeing,

While yet in Eden's bowers

Dwelt the first husband and his sinless mate!
The one sweet plant, which, piteous heaven agreeing,
They bore with them through Eden's closing gate!
Of life's gay summer tide the sovran rose!
Late autumn's amaranth, that more fragrant blows
When passion's flowers all fall or fade;

If this were ever his, in outward being,
Or but his own true love's projected shade,
Now that at length by certain proof he knows
That, whether real or a magic show,
Whate'er it was, it is no longer so;
Though heart be lonesome, hope laid low,

Yet, lady, deem him not unblest;

The certainty that struck hope dead

Hath left contentment in her stead:

And that is next to best!

And still finer, we think, than anything we have yet

given, is the following, entitled

Patience, in Education :'

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Love, Hope, and

O'er wayward childhood would'st thou hold firm rule, And sun thee in the light of happy faces;

Love, Hope, and Patience, these must be thy graces,
And in thine own heart let them first keep school.
For, as old Atlas on his broad neck places
Heaven's starry globe, and there sustains it ;-so
Do these upbear the little world below
Of Education,-Patience, Love, and Hope.
Methinks, I see them grouped in seemly show,
The straitened arms upraised, the palms aslope,
And robes that touching, as adown they flow,
Distinctly blend, like snow embossed in snow.
O part them never! If Hope prostrate lie,
Love too will sink and die.

But Love is subtle, and doth proof derive
From her own life that Hope is yet alive;
And, bending o'er with soul-transfusing eyes,
And the soft murmurs of the mother dove,
Woos back the fleeting spirit, and half supplies
Thus Love repays to Hope what Hope first gave to Love.

Yet haply there will come a weary day,

When overtasked at length

Both Love and Hope beneath the load give way.
Then, with a statue's smile, a statue's strength,
Stands the mute sister, Patience, nothing loth,
And both supporting does the work of both.

SOUTHEY.

Coleridge died in 1834; his friend Southey, born three years later, survived to 1843. If Coleridge wrote too little poetry, Southey may be said to have written too much and too rapidly. Southey, as well as Coleridge, has been popularly reckoned one of the Lake poets; but it is difficult to assign any meaning to that name which should entitle it to comprehend either the one or the other. Southey, indeed, was, in the commencement of his career, the associate of Wordsworth and Coleridge; a portion of his first poem, his 'Joan of Arc,' published in 1796, was written by Coleridge; and

he afterwards took up his residence, as well as Wordsworth, among the lakes of Westmoreland. But, although in his first volume of minor poems, published in 1797, there was something of the same simplicity or plainness of style, and choice of subjects from humble life, by which Wordsworth sought to distinguish himself about the same time, the manner of the one writer bore only a very superficial resemblance to that of the other; whatever it was, whether something quite original, or only, in the main, an inspiration caught from the Germans, that gave its peculiar character to Wordsworth's poetry, it was wanting in Southey's; he was evidently, with all his ingenuity and fertility, and notwithstanding an ambition of originality which led him to be continually seeking after strange models, from Arabian and Hindoo mythologies to Latin hexameters, of a genius radically imitative, and not qualified to put forth its strength except while moving in a beaten track and under the guidance of long established rules. Southey was by nature a conservative in literature as well as in politics, and the eccentricity of his Thalabas' and Kehamas' was as merely spasmodic as the Jacobinism of his ' Wat Tyler.' But even' Thalaba' and 'Kehama,' whatever they may be, are surely not poems of the Lake school. And in most of his other poems, especially in his last epic, Roderick, the Last of the Goths,' Southey is in verse what he always was in prose, one of the most thoroughly and unaffectedly English of our modern writers. The verse, however, is too like prose to be poetry of a very high order; it is flowing and eloquent, but has little of the distinctive life or lustre of poetical composition. There is much splendour and

6

beauty, however, in the Curse of Kehama,' the most elaborate of his long poems. As a specimen we will transcribe from the beginning of the Seventh Book or Canto the description of the voyage of the heroine, the lovely and virtuous Kailyal, through the air to the Swerga, or lowest heaven, with her preserver the Glendoveer, or pure spirit, Ereenia :—

Then in the ship of heaven Ereenia laid

The waking, wondering maid;

The ship of heaven, instinct with thought, displayed
Its living sail, and glides along the sky.

On either side, in wavy tide,

The clouds of morn along its path divide;
The winds who swept in wild career on high
Before its presence check their charmed force;
The winds that loitering lagged along their course
Around the living bark enamoured play,
Swell underneath the sail, and sing before its way.
That bark, in shape, was like the furrowed shell
Wherein the sea-nymphs to their parent-king,
On festal day, their duteous offerings bring.
Its hue?-Go watch the last green light
Ere evening yields the western star to night; ́
Or fix upon the sun thy strenuous sight
Till thou hast reached its orb of chrysolite.
The sail, from end to end displayed,
Bent, like a rainbow, o'er the maid.
An angel's head, with visual eye,
Through trackless space directs its chosen way;
Nor aid of wing, nor foot, nor fin,

Requires to voyage o'er the obedient sky.
Smooth as the swan when not a breeze at even
Disturbs the surface of the silver stream,
Through air and sunshine sails the ship of heaven.
Recumbent there the maiden glides along
On her aërial way,

How swift she feels not, though the swiftest wind
Had flagged in flight behind.

Motionless as a sleeping babe she lay,
And all serene in mind,