In angelic wilderment

O'er the depths of God, and brought
Reeling, thence, one only thought
To fill his whole eternity!

He the teacher is for me!—

He can teach what I would know-
Mother, mother let me go!

Can your poet make an Eden
No winter will undo?

And light a starry fire, in heeding
His hearth's is burning too?
Drown in music, earthly din ?—
And keep his own wild soul within
The law of his own harmony?-
Mother! albeit this be so,
Let me to mine Heaven go!
A little harp me waits thereby-
A harp whose strings are golden all,
And tuned to music spherical,
Hanging on the green life-tree,
Where no willows ever be.
Shall I miss that harp of mine?
Mother, no!—the Eye divine
Turned upon it makes its shine-
And when I touch it poems sweet,

Like separate souls shall fly from it,
Each to an immortal fytte !

We shall all be poets there,
Gazing on the chieftest Fair!"

There is something not very remote from a trenching on debateable ground in more than one portion of these remarkable extracts. It will be seen also that the fair writer is easily led into the pursuit of fantastic images and overwrought conceits, when the nature of the topic and the solemnity of concomitant thoughts demand a sustained and straightforward simplicity. But the beauty and the power of the poetess are, nevertheless, so apparent in these lines, that the reader must feel she has only to set her mind to the task and she will perform still more admirable things. We present another specimen, in which imagination and depth of sentiment are finely blended.

The Sea-Mew.

"How joyously the young sea-mew Lay dreaming on the waters blue, Whereon our little bark had thrown A forward shade-the only one(But shadows aye will man pursue !) VOL. 111. (1838.) No. I.

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Familiar with the waves, and free,
As if their own white foam were he:
His heart upon the heart of ocean,
Learning all its mystic motion,
And throbbing to the throbbing sea!
And such a brightness in his eye,
As if the ocean, and the sky,
Within him had lit up and nurst
A soul God gave him not at first,
To comprehend their majesty.
We were not cruel, yet did sunder
His white wing from the blue waves under,
And bound it-while his fearless eyes
Shone up to ours in calm surprise,
As deeming us some ocean wonder!
We bore our ocean bird into

A grassy place where he might view
The flowers bending to the bees,
The waving of the tall green trees,
The falling of the silver dew.

But flowers of earth were pale to him
Who had seen the rainbow fishes swim;
And when earth's dew around him lay,
He thought of ocean's wingled spray;
And his eye waxed sad and dim.
The green trees round him only made
A prison, with their darksome shade:
And drooped his wing, and mourned he
For his own boundless glittering sea-
Albeit he knew not they could fade!
Then One her gladsome face did bring,
Her gentle voice's murmuring,
In ocean's stead his heart to move,
And teach him what was human love-
He thought it a strange, mournful thing!
He lay down in his grief to die,
(First looking to the sea-like sky,
That hath no waves !) because, alas!
Our human touch did on him pass!
And with our touch, our agony."

Belfegor" is a satirical piece founded upon the "Novella di Belfegor" of Machiavel. Although we are not great admirers of such common-place ridicule as the author frequently lets loose, in the department of politics, for instance, being nothing more nor better than what every penny-a-line radical constantly deals out, when the House of Peers, the Church, the Bishops, &c. are mentioned, yet he evinces considerable cleverness in passing from one subject

to another, so as not to seem the result of study or of art, as well as pith in his satire and ease of versification in expressing himself. The poem consists of a debate held in the regions below, the great text being whether women have been misrepresented when they are accused of constituting the bane of the other sex. But the speakers by no means confine themselves to one subject particularly; on the contrary they are amazingly diffuse and desultory, traversing the whole world of abuses, and cutting right and left without regard to the supremacy of man, or the beauty and tenderness of woman. Our first extract gives an account of Abaddon's literary habits; the second communicates the result of Belfegor's having been sent to earth, to dwell there in human form for ten years, that he might be enabled to report from actual experience upon the question at issue.

Was, doubtless, strangely furnished,
With odds and ends, and scraps of lore,
Gleaned chiefly from the days of yore,
When Learning, in a mingled yarn
Of odd materials, kept her warm :
A cloak so large, and strangely made,
The virgin seemed in masquerade;
For, strewed with patches here and there,
Both long and short, and round and square,
It wrapt her in so dense a screen,
Her features scarcely could be seen.

Astrology, upon the back,

Had from his crazy almanac

Copied his circles, squares, and trines,

And sundry caballistic signs;

Which made Astronomy run wild,

To see her science so defiled.

Then both the elbows (which, from leaning
Upon her desk to find the meaning
Of certain tomies of School divinity,
(Where Sense, split into an infinity
Of slender threads, had lost its strength),
Had fallen into holes at length,)
Were patched with sundry filthy rags
From Superstition's hoarded bags.
Enveloped thus in ancient days,

Poor Learning, in the endless maze
Of this strange garment, which impeded
The wholesome air and light she needed,
Sat brooding o'er, in dull inaction,

Some metaphysical abstraction.

What marvel, then, since from this source,
Abaddon's knowledge held its course,

'Such reading as was never read**
Crept slily in, and made his head
Resemble, from the crude injection,
A Bibliomaniac's collection!

Where first editions are still reckoned
Far better than the third, or second,
And, though well known to be the worst,
Are prized, because they are the first:
Where, pilfered from the good old times,
Black-letter tomes or nursery rhymes
Are purchased for their weight in gold,
Merely because the date is old-
Although the veriest trash that e'er
Made printer's imp or pressman stare.†”
Large-paper copies, too-uniques,
(Such are the Bibliomaniac's freaks),
Prized not for their contents, but only
Because the precious work's a lonely
Unmarried book, and has no brothers
Το
grace the unhappy shelves of others.
Scarce manuscripts-(alas! we know
What we such collectors owe,
When Massinger, with genius fraught,
Recurs to the indignant thought)-
Scarce manuscripts to deck the study,
Till some fair cook-maid, sleek and ruddy,
To singe her cursed fowls, bereaves
Poor Learning of the Sibyl's leaves.‡

In fact, Abaddon, from his college,

Brought with him a great name for knowledge,
Having passed the ordeal with much credit;
And some ('twas Belzebub that said it)
Maintained him equal in profundity

To any on the world's rotundity.

"Pope's Dunciad."

† "Books are purchased now at extravagant rates, not because they are good, but because they are scarce.'-Gifford's Massinger."

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‡ Among the manuscript plays collected with so much care by Mr, Warburton (Somerset Herald), and applied with such perseverance, by his cook, to the covering of his pies, were no less than twelve said to be written by Massinger;' and, when it is added that, altogether with these, forty other manuscript plays of various authors were destroyed, it will readily be allowed that English literature has seldom sustained a greater loss than by the strange conduct of Mr. Warburton, who, becoming the master of treasures which ages may not reproduce, lodges them, as he says, in the hands of an ignorant servant, and when, after a lapse of years, he condescends to revisit his hoards, finds that they have been burnt from an economical wish to save him the charges of more valuable brown paper.'-Gifford's Massinger."

Though many, sceptical of this,
Thought otherwise, it passed nem. diss.
Among the crowd, who still are prone
To other's thoughts to yield their own:
Its truth I'll therefore not dispute,
Although the blossoms bore no fruit.
For he, exerting great self-knowledge,
Determined, since he came from college,
A sort of literary comet,

No act of his detracting from it,
Should, with his intervening haze,
Obstruct his reputation's blaze:
And, therefore, lingering near the shores
Of Learning, lay upon his oars,
Nor ventured from their shade to creep
Into the bathos, or great deep,
Since numbers in that frothy sea
Had shipwrecked been, and why not he?
No folios, therefore, theological-
No quartos, anti-geological-
Octavos, dry and metaphysical-
Duodecimos, so short and quizzical-
Or in Reviews, no learned article
On men or books, in which no particle
Of the poor author's thoughts are shewn,
But merely the reviewer's own—

Came from him, to bring down this hero

In Fame's thermometer to zero.

津

Having, in short, obtained the name

Of being wise, which is the same
With many who believe whate'er
The world is pleased to say or swear:
He still contrived to keep his station,
By living on his reputation,
And nursing it with mighty care,
As mothers do a sickly heir.
Such was the imp."

Now for the concluding report :

"Behold him, then, well fitted out,
Take leave of the infernal rout,
And haste, although with sore misgiving,
Above, to join the quick and living,
Doomed for a space to dwell with men!

'Returned from earth, what said he then ?"
What said he ?-Ere a year was gone
He hurried back, so pale and wan,
The wondering demons scarcely knew
Their ancient crony, leal and true,