FAME.

(From "Lycidas.")

How sweetly did they float upon the wings
Of silence, through the empty-vaulted night,
At every fall smoothing the raven down

FAME is the spur that the clear spirit doth of darkness till it smiled! I have oft beard

raise,

(That last infirmity of noble mind) To scorn delights, and live laborious days; But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,

And think to burst out into sudden blaze,

Comes the blind Fury with the abhorred

shears,

And slits the thin-spun life. But not the praise,
Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling

ears;

Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glistening foil,

Set off to the world, nor in broad rumor lies;
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove
As he pronounces lastly on each deed,

Of so much fame in heaven expect thy meed.
JOHN MILTON.

FROM "THE MASQUE OF
COMUS."

AN any mortal mixture of earth's mould
Breathe such divine enchanting ravish-
ment?

Sure something holy lodges in that breast,
And with these raptures moves the vocal air
To testify his hidden residence.

My mother Circe, with the Sirens three,
Amidst the flowery-kirtled Naiads,
Who as they sung would take the prisoned
Culling their potent herbs and baleful drugs,

soul

And lap it in Elysium; Scylla wept,

And fell Charybdis murmured soft applause;
And chid her barking waves into attention,
Yet they in pleasing slumber lulled the sense,
And in sweet madness robbed it of itself;
But such a sacred and home-felt delight,
Such sober certainty of waking bliss,
I never heard till now.

-if Vertue feeble, were Heaven it selfe would stoope to her.

pile.

And Heaven's last thunder shakes the world And light thy torch at Nature's funeral below, Thou, undismayed, shalt o'er the ruins smile,

THOMAS CAMPBELL.

OF OBSCURITY.

W

HAT a brave privilege is it to be free from all contentions, from all envying, or being envied, from receiving or paying all kinds of ceremonies! It is, in my mind, a very delightful pastime for two good and agreeable friends to travel up and down together, in places where they are by nobody known, nor know anybody. It was the case of Æneas and his Achates, when they walked invisibly about the fields of Carthage; Venus herself

"A veil of thickened air around them cast,

That none might know or see them as they passed."

The common story of Demosthenes' confession, that he had taken great pleasure in hearing of a tanker-woman say as he passed, "This is that Demosthenes," is wonderful ridiculous from so solid an orator. I myself have often met with that temptation to vanity, if it were any; but am so far from finding it any pleasure, that it only makes me run faster from the place, till I get, as it were, out of sight-shot. Democritus relates, and in such a manner as if he gloried in the good fortune and commodity of it, that when he came to Athens, nobody there did so much as take notice of him; and Epicurus lived there very well, that is, lay hid many years in his gardens, so famous since that time, with his friend Metrodorus; after whose death, making in one of his letters a kind of commemoration of the happiness which they two had enjoyed together, he adds at last that he thought it no disparagement to those great felicities of their life that in the midst of the most talked of and talking country in the world, they had lived so long, not only without fame, but almost without being heard of; and yet, within a very few years afterwards, there were never two names of men more known, or more generally celebrated. If we engage into a large acquaintance and various familiarities, we set open our gates to the invaders of most of our time; we expose our life to a quotidian ague of frigid impertinences, which would make a wise man tremble to think of. Now, as for being known by sight, and pointed at, I cannot comprehend the honor that lies in that; whatsoever it be, every mounteback has it more than the best doctors, and the hangman more than the Lord Chief Justice of a city. Every creature has it, both of nature and art, if it be any ways extraordinary. It was as often said, "This is that Bucephalus," or "This is that Incitatus," when they were led prancing through the streets, as, "This is that Alexander," or "This is that Domitian;" and truly, for the latter, I take Incitatus to have been a much more honorable beast than his master, and more deserving the consulship than he the empire.

I love and commend a true good fame, because it is the shadow of virtue; not that it doth any good to the body which it accompanies, but it is an efficacious shadow, and, like that of St. Peter, cures the diseases of others. The best kind of glory, no doubt, is that which is reflected from honesty, such as was the glory of Cato and Aristides; but it was harmful to them both, and is seldom beneficial to any man whilst he lives. What it is to him after his death, I cannot say, because I love not philosophy merely notional and conjectural; and no man who has made the experiment has been so kind as to come back to inform us. Upon the whole matter, I account a person who has a moderate mind and fortune, and lives in the conversation of two or three agreeable friends, with little commerce in the world beside, who is esteemed well enough by his neighbors that know him, and is truly irreproachable by anybody; and so. after a healthful quiet life, before the great inconveniences of old age, goes more

silently out of it than he came in (for I would not have him so much as cry in the exit); this innocent deceiver of the world, as Horace calls him, this muta persona, I take to have been more happy in his part than the greatest actors that fill the stage with show and noise; nay, even than Augustus himself, who asked with his last breath whether he had not played his farce very well.

WHA

FOR PRAISE.

(From "The Love of Fame."')

ABRAHAM COWLEY.

In the next line it "whispers through the trees;" If crystal streams "with pleasing murmurs creep,"

HAT will not men attempt for sacred The reader's threatened, not in vain with W praise?

The love of praise, howe'er concealed by art,
Reigns more or less, and glows in every

heart;

The proud, to gain it, toils on toils endure;
The modest shun it but to make it sure;
O'er globes and scepters, now on thrones it
swells,

Now trims the midnight lamp in college cells;
It aids the dancer's heel, the writer's head,
And heaps the plain with mountains of the
dead;

Nor ends with life, but nods in sable plumes,
Adorns our hearse, and flatters on our tombs.
EDWARD YOUNG.

ADVICE TO POETS.

(From An Essay on Criticism.")

"sleep."

Then at the last and only couplet fraught
With some unmeaning thing they call a

thought,

A needless Alexandrine ends the song,
That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow
length along.

Leave such to tune their own dull rhymes,
and know

What's roundly smooth, or languishingly
slow,

And praise the easy vigor of a line
Where Denham's strength and Waller's sweet-

ness join.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,

As those move easiest who have learned to

dance.

'Tis not enough; no harshness gives offense;

N words as fashions, the same rule will hold, The sound must seem an echo to the sense;
Alike fantastic, if too new or old;

Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
But most by numbers judge a poet's song;
And smooth or rough with them is right or
wrong;

In the bright Muse though thousand charms
conspire,

Her voice is all these tuneful fools admire,
Who haunt Parnassus but to please their ear,
Not mend their minds; as some to church re-
pair,

Not for the doctrine, but the music there;
These equal syllables alone require,
Though oft the ear the open vowels tire,
While expletives their feeble aid do join,
And ten slow words oft creep in one dull line;
While they ring round the same unvaried
chimes,

With sure returns of still expected rhymes;
Where'er you find "the cooling western
breeze,"

Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers

flows;

But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the tor-

rent roar;

When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to
throw,

The line too labors, and the words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along

the main;

Hear how Timotheus' varied lays surprise,
And bid alternate passions fall and rise:
While at each change, the son of Lybian Jove
Now burns with glory, and then melts with

love;

Now his fierce eyes with sparkling fury glow,
Now sighs steal out, and tears begin to flow;
Persians and Greeks like turns of nature found,
And the world's victor stood subdued by
sound.
ALEXANDER POPE.

A CONTENTED MIND.
WEIGH not fortune's frown or smile;
I joy not much in earthly joys;
I seek not state, I seek not style;
I am not fond of fancy's toys;
I rest so pleased with what I have,
I wish no more, no more I crave.

I quake not at the thunder's crack;
I tremble not at noise of war;
I swound not at the news of wrack;
I shrink not at a blazing star;
I fear not loss, I hope not gain,
I envy none, I none disdain.

I see ambition never pleased;

I see some Tantals starved in store;
I see gold's dropsy seldom eased;

I see e'en Midas gape for more;
I neither want, nor yet abound;
Enough's a feast, content is crowned.

I feign not friendship where I hate;
I fawn not on the great in show;
I prize, I praise a mean estate,

P

Neither too lofty nor too low;
This, this is all my choice, my cheer,
A mind content, a conscience clear.
JOSHUA SYLVESTER.

PROCRASTINATION.

(From Night Thoughts.")

BE wise to-day; 'tis madness to defer;

Next day the fatal precedent will plead;
Thus on, till wisdom is pushed out of life.
Procrastination is the thief of time;
Year after year it steals, till all are fled,
And to the mercies of a moment leaves
The vast concerns of an eternal scene.
If not so frequent would not this be strange?
That 'tis so frequent, this is stranger still;
Of man's miraculous mistakes, this bears
The palm, that all men are about to live,
Forever on the brink of being born;
All pay themselves the compliment to think
They one day shall not drivel; and their pride
On this reversion takes up ready praise.
EDWARD YOUNG.

PERCEPTION OF POETRY.

(From "Daniel Deronda."')

ERHAPS poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in the world, except for those phlegmatic natures, who, I suspect, would in any age have regarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking. They exist very easily in the same room with the microscope, and even in railway carriages; what banishes them is the vacuum in gentlemen and lady passengers. How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that has no movements of awe or tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?

MARIAN EVANS CROSS. (George Eliot.")

0

A TASTE FOR READING.

F I were to pray for a taste which should stand me in stead under every variety of circumstances, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me through life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss, and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for reading. I speak of it, of course, only as a worldly advantage, and not in the slightest degree as superseding or derogating from the higher office and surer and stronger panoply of religious principles, but as a taste, an instrument, and a mode of pleasurable gratification. Give a man this taste, and the means of gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of making a happy man, unless, indeed, you put into his hands a most perverse selection of books. You place him in contact with the best society in every period of history-with the wisest, the wittiest-with the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest characters that have adorned humanity. You make him a denizen of all nations-a contemporary of all ages. The