SELECT PASSAGES IN VERSE.

7. Now all is changed; and here, as in the wild,
The day is silent, dreary as the night;
None stirring, save the herdsman and his herd,
Savage alike; or they that would explore,
And learnedly discuss; or they that come
(And there are many who have crossed the earth)
That they may give the hours to meditation,
And wander, often saying to themselves,
"This was the Roman Forum!"

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ROWERS.

CXLVI.

SELECT PASSAGES IN VERSE.

1. THE PLEASURES OF HOPE.— Campbell.
AT summer eve, when Heaven's ethereal bow
Spans with bright arch the glittering hills below,
Why to yon mountain turns the musing eye,
Whose sunbright summit mingles with the sky?
Why do those cliffs of shadowy tint appear
More sweet than all the landscape smiling near?
"Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,
And robes the mountain in its azure hue.
Thus, with delight, we linger to survey
The promised joys of life's unmeasured way;
Thus from afar each dim-discovered scene

More pleasing seems than all the past hath been;
And every form that Fancy can repair,
From dark oblivion, glows divinely there.

Nor Fame I slight, nor for her favors call;
She comes unlooked for, if she comes at all.
But if the purchase cost so dear a price
As soothing Folly, or exalting Vice,
O! if the Muse I must flatter lawless sway,
And follow still where Fortune leads the way,
Or if no basis bear my rising name,
But the fallen ruins of another's fame,-
Then teach me, Heaven! to scorn the guilty bays,
Drive from my breast that wretched lust of praise :
Unblemished let me live, or die unknown;

O, grant an honest fame, or grant me none!8

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Why start at death? Where is he? Death arrived
Is past; not come, or gone, he's never here!
Ere hope, sensation fails; black-boding man
Receives, not suffers, death's tremendous blow.

The knell, the shroud, the mattock, and the grave,
The deep, damp vault, the darkness, and the worm,
These are the bugbears of a winter's eve,
The terrors of the living, not the dead.
Imagination's fool, and error's wretch,

Man makes a death which Nature never made;
Then on the point of his own fancy falls,
And feels a thousand deaths in fearing one.

O! bloodiest picture in the book of time,
Sarmatia fell, unwept, without a crime;
Found not a generous friend, a pitying foe,
Strength in her arms, nor mercy in her woe!
Dropped from her nerveless grasp the shattered spear,
Closed her bright eye, and curbed her high career;-
Hope for a season bade the world farewell,
And Freedom shrieked when Kosciusko fell!

5. THE CAPTIVE'S DREAMS. - Mrs. Hemans.

I dream of all things free! of a gallant, gallant bark,
That sweeps through storm and sea like an arrow to its mark;
Of a stag that o'er the hills goes bounding in its glee;
Of a thousand flashing rills, — of all things glad and free.
I dream of some proud bird, a bright-eyed mountain king!
In my visions I have heard the rushing of his wing.
I follow some wild river, on whose breast no sail may be
Dark woods around it shiver, I dream of all things free;
Of a happy forest child, with the fawns and flowers at play,
Of an Indian 'midst the wild, with the stars to guide his way;
Of a chief his warriors leading, of an archer's greenwood tree;
My heart in chains is bleeding, and I dream of all things free!

;

Whom call we gay? that honor has been long
The boast of mere pretenders to the name.
The innocent are gay-
- the lark is gay,
That dries his feathers, saturate with dew,
Beneath the rosy cloud, while yet the beams
Of day-spring overshoot his humble nest.
The peasant, too, a witness of his song,
Himself a songster, is as gay as he.

But save me from the gayety of those

Whose headaches nail them to a noonday bed;

And save me, too, from theirs whose haggard eyes
Flash desperation, and betray their pangs
For property stripped off by cruel chance;
From gayety that fills the bones with pain,

The mouth with blasphemy, the heart with woe!

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CXLVII. - SHAKSPEARE'S POWER OF EXPRESSION.

1. To say that he was the greatest man that ever lived is to provoke a useless controversy, and comparisons that lead to nothing, between Shakspeare and Cæsar, Shakspeare and Charlemagne, Shakspeare and Cromwell; E to say that he was the greatest intellect that ever lived is to bring the shades of Aristotle, and Plato, and Bacon, and Newton, and all your other

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systematic thinkers, grumbling about us, with demands for a definition of intellect, which we are by no means in a position to give; nay, finally, to say that he is the greatest poet that the world has produced (a thing which we would certainly say, were we provoked to it) would be unnecessarily to hurt the feelings of Homer, and Soph'o-cles, and Dantë, and Milton. What we will say, then, and what we will challenge the world to gainsay, is that he was the greatest expresser that ever lived. This is glory enough, and it leaves the other question open.

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2. Other men may have led, on the whole, greater and more impressive lives than he; other men, acting on their fellows through the same medium of speech that he used, may have expended a greater power of thought, and achieved a greater intellectual effect, in one consistent direction; other men, too (though this is very questionable), may have contrived to issue the matter which they did address to the world in more compact and perfect artistic shapes. But no man that ever lived said such splendid ex-tempo-re things on all subjects universally; no man that ever lived had the faculty of pouring out on all occasions such a flood of the richest and deepest language. He may have had rivals in the art of imagining situations; he had no rival in the power of sending a gush of the appropriate intellectual effusion over the image and body of a situation once conceived.

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3. From the jewelled ring on an alderman's finger to the most mountainous thought or deed of man or dēmon, nothing suggested itself that his speech could not envelop and enfold with ease. That excessive fluency which astonished Ben Jonson when he listened to Shakspeare in person astonishes the world yet. Abundance, ease, redundance, a plenitude of word, sound, and im'agery, which, were the intellect at work only a little less magnificent, would sometimes end in sheer braggardism and bombast," are the characteristics of Shakspeare's style. Nothing is suppressed, nothing omitted, nothing cancelled. On and on the poet flows, words, thoughts, and fancies, crowding on him as fast as he can write, all related to the matter on hand, and all poured forth together, to rise and fall on the waves of an established cadence.

4. Such lightness and ease in the manner, and such prodigious wealth and depth in the matter, are combined in no other writer. How the matter was first accumulated—what proportion of it was the acquired capital of former efforts, and what proportion of it welled up in the poet's mind during and in virtue of the very act of speech it is impossible to say; but this, at least, may be affirmed without fear of contradiction, that there never was a mind in the world from which, when it was pricked by any occa

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MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ELOQUENCE.

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sion whatever, there poured forth on the instant such a stream of precious substance intellectually related to it. By his powers of expression, in fact, Shakspeare has beggared all his posterity, and left mere practitioners of expression nothing possible to do.

5. There is, perhaps, not a thought, or feeling, or situation, really common and gener'ic to human life, on which he has not exercised his prerogative; and wherever he has once been, woe to the man that comes after him! He has overgrown the whole system and face of things, like a universal ivy, which has left no wall uncovered, no pinnacle unclimbed, no chink unpenetrated. Since he lived, the concrete world has worn a richer surface. He found it great and beautiful, with stripes here and there of the rough old coat seen through the leafy labors of his predecessors; he left it clothed throughout with the wealth and autumnal luxuriance of his own unparalleled language.

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

CXLVIII.

- MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ELOQUENCE.

1. RELIGION ESSENTIAL TO MORALITY. Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked, where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that, morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles. -Geo. Washington.

2. UNAPPRECIATED OBLIGATIONS. We live in the midst. of blessings till we are utterly insensible of their greatness, and of the source whence they flow. We speak of our civilization, our arts, our freedom, our laws, and forget entirely how large a share is due to Christianity. Blot Christianity out of man's history, and what would his laws have been, what his civilization? Christianity is mixed up with our very being and our very life;