the Fire Worshippers, the finest of the four tales composing Lalla Rookh, of the calm after a storm, in which the heroine, the gentle Hinda, awakens in the war-bark of her lover Hafed, the noble Gheber chief, into which she had been transferred from her own galley while she had swooned with terror from the tempest and the fight:

How calm, how beautiful comes on
The stilly hour when storms are gone!
When warring winds have died away,
And clouds, beneath the dancing ray,
Melt off, and leave the land and sea
Sleeping in bright tranquillity--
Fresh as if day again were born,
Again upon the lap of morn!
When the light blossoms, rudely torn
And scattered at the whirlwind's will,
Hang floating in the pure air still,
Filling it all with precious balm,
In gratitude for this sweet calm :-
And every drop the thunder-showers
Have left upon the grass and flowers
Sparkles, as 'twere that lightning gem
Whose liquid flame is born of them!

When, 'stead of one unchanging breeze,
There blow a thousand gentle airs,
And each a different perfume bears,—
As if the loveliest plants and trees
Had vassal breezes of their own,
To watch and wait on them alone,
And waft no other breath than theirs!
When the blue waters rise and fall,

In sleepy sunshine mantling all;
And even that swell the tempest leaves

Is like the full and silent heaves

Of lovers' hearts when newly blest

Too newly to be quite at rest!
Such was the golden hour that broke
Upon the world, when Hinda woke
From her long trance, and heard around
No motion but the water's sound
Rippling against the vessel's side,
As slow it mounted o'er the tide.-
But where is she?-her eyes are dark,
Are wildered still-is this the bark,
The same that from Harmozia's bay
Bore her at morn-whose bloody way

The sea-dog tracks?-No! strange and new
Is all that meets her wondering view.
Upon a galliot's deck she lies,

Beneath no rich pavilion's shade,
No plumes to fan her sleeping eyes,
Nor jasmin on her pillow laid.
But the rude litter, roughly spread
With war-cloaks, is her homely bed,
And shawl and sash, on javelins hung,
For awning o'er her head are flung.
Shuddering she looked around-there lay
A group of warriors in the sun
Resting their limbs, as for that day
Their ministry of death were done;
Some gazing on the drowsy sea,
Lost in unconscious reverie;

And some, who seemed but ill to brook
That sluggish calm, with many a look

To the slack sail impatient cast,

As loose it flagged before the mast.

Crabbe, born in 1754, lived till 1832; Campbell, born in 1777, died in 1844; Moore, born in 1780, died in 1851.

BYRON.

Byron was the writer whose blaze of popularity it mainly was that threw Scott's name into the shade, and induced him to abandon verse. Yet the productions which had this effect-the Giaour, the Bride of Abydos, the Corsair, &c., published in 1813 and 1814 (for the new idolatry was scarcely kindled by the two respectable, but somewhat tame, cantos of Childe Harold, in quite another style, which appeared shortly before these effusions), were, in reality, only poems written in what may be called a variation of Scott's own manner-Oriental lays and romances, Turkish Marmions and Ladies of the Lake. The novelty of scene and subject, the exaggerated tone of passion in the outlandish tales, and a certain trickery in the writing (for it will hardly now be called anything else), materially aided by the mysterious interest attaching to the personal history of the noble bard, who, whether he sung of Giaours, or Corsairs, or Laras, was always popularly believed to be "himself the great sublime

he drew," wonderfully excited and intoxicated the public mind at first, and for a time made all other poetry seem spiritless and wearisome; but, if Byron had adhered to the style by which his fame was thus originally made, it probably would have proved transient enough. Few will now be found to assert that there is anything in these earlier poems of his comparable to the great passages in those of Scott-to the battle in Marmion, for instance, or the raising of the clansmen by the fiery cross in the Lady of the Lake, or many others that might be mentioned. But Byron's vigorous and elastic genius, although it had already tried various styles of poetry, was, in truth, as yet only preluding to its proper display. First, there had been the very small note of the Hours of Idleness; then, the sharper, but not more original or much more promising, strain of the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (a satirical attempt in all respects inferior to Gifford's Baviad and Mæviad, of which it was a slavish imitation); next, the certainly far higher and more matured, but still quiet and commonplace, manner of the first two cantos of Childe Harold; after that, suddenly the false glare and preternatural vehemence of these Oriental rhapsodies, which yet, however, with all their hollowness and extravagance, evinced infinitely more power than anything he had previously done, or rather were the only poetry he had yet produced that gave proof of any remarkable poetic genius. The Prisoner of Chillon and Parisina, The Siege of Corinth and Mazeppa, followed, all in a spirit of far more truth, and depth, and beauty than the other tales that had preceded them; but the highest forms of Byron's poetry must be sought for in the two last cantos of Childe Harold, in his Cain and his Manfred, and, above all, in his Don Juan. The last-mentioned extraordinary work is, of course, excluded by its levities and audacities from any comparison in which the moral element is taken into account with such poems as Young's Night Thoughts and Cowper's Task, or even with Thomson's Seasons or Wordsworth's Excursion; but looked at simply from an artistic point of view, and without reference to anything except the genius and power of writing which it manifests, it will be difficult to resist its claim to be regarded as on the whole the greatest English poem that had appeared either in the present or in the preceding century. It is unfinished, indeed; but so are both the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer and the Fairy Queen of Spenser. Even what of it is objectionable on moral grounds may still be of

great literary brilliancy; and, at any rate, the merit of the rest would not be affected by what might be so excepted to. It contains abundance of poetry as exquisite as is to be found in any one of the other poetical works which were added to our literature within the period in question, and no other displays a poetic genius nearly so rich and various-so great in the most opposite kinds of writing, from the lightest play of wit and satire up to the noblest strains of impassioned song. We will quote only the letter of Julia to Juan in the First Canto, which may be compared with the letter of Constance in Campbell's Theodric, given a few pages back :

"I loved, I love you, for this love have lost

State, station, heaven, mankind's, my own esteem,

And yet cannot regret what it hath cost,

So dear is still the memory of that dream;
Yet, if I name my guilt, 'tis not to boast;
None can deem harshlier of me than I deem;
I trace this scrawl because I cannot rest-
I've nothing to reproach, or to request.

"Man's love is of man's life a thing apart;

"Tis woman's whole existence ;-man may range The court, camp, church, the vessel, and the mart; Sword, gown, gain, glory offer in exchange

Pride, fame, ambition, to fill up his heart,

And few there are whom these cannot estrange.
Men have all these resources, we but one,—

To love again, and be again undone.

"You will proceed in pleasure and in pride,
Beloved and loving many; all is o'er

For me on earth, except some years to hide

My shame and sorrow deep in my heart's core;

These I could bear, but cannot cast aside

The passion which still rages as before;
And so farewell-forgive me, love me~)
-No,
That word is idle now, but let it go.

"My breast has been all weakness, is so yet;
But still I think I can collect my mind;
My blood still rushes where my spirits set,
As roll the waves before the settled wind;
My heart is feminine, nor can forget—

To all, except one image, madly blind;
So shakes the needle, and so stands the pole,
As vibrates my fond heart to my fixed soul.

"I have no more to say, but linger still,

And dare not set my seal upon this sheet;
And yet I may as well the task fulfil,

My misery can scarce be more complete;

I had not lived till now could sorrow kill:

Death shuns the wretch who fain the blow would meet,
And I must even survive this last adieu,

And bear with life to love and pray for you!"

SHELLEY.

Yet the highest poetical genius of this time, if it was not that of Coleridge, was, probably, that of Shelley. Byron died in 1824, at the age of thirty-six; Shelley in 1822, at that of twenty-nine. What Shelley produced during the brief term allotted to him on earth, much of it passed in sickness and sorrow, is remarkable for its quantity, but much more wonderful for the quality of the greater part of it. His Queen Mab, written when he was eighteen, crude and defective as it is, and unworthy to be classed with what he wrote in his maturer years, was probably the richest promise that was ever given at so early an age of poetic power, the fullest assurance that the writer was born a poet. From the date of his Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude, the earliest written of the poems published by himself, to his death, was not quite seven years. The Revolt of Islam, in twelve cantos, or books, the dramas of Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, and Hellas, the tale of Rosalind and Helen, The Masque of Anarchy, The Sensitive Plant, Julian and Maddalo, The Witch of Atlas, Epipsychidion, Adonais, The Triumph of Life, the translations of Homer's Hymn to Mercury, of the Cyclops of Euripides, and of the scenes from Calderon and