are thousands, we hope, that would not hesitate to join as many Spenser and Fielding Clubs as might be formed. But Shakspeare was of all others a social genius, and stands first in more senses than one. Milton himself regarded him with "wonder and astonishment." Cowper thought it praise enough "To fill the ambition of a private man, That Shakspeare's language was his mother-tongue." And Wordsworth, an authority no less illustrious, exclaims in one of his sonnets, "We must be free, or die, who speak the tongue That Shakspeare spake." The season of the year in which the birth-day falls, is itself an argument for its celebration-that season, to use his own words -- "When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, Has put a spirit of youth in everything.” a time whose sanctity and loveliness' have been beautifully touched upon in some verses that celebrate "The hallow'd morn when Will was born, in the spring-time of the year. "Some morn symbolic of his mind-elastic, warm, serene; Whose smile expansive lighted up man's universal scene; Whose subtle spirit everywhere could penetrate and cheer On such a morn our Will was born, in the spring-time of the year." Shakspeare Songs, by JOHN OGDEN. After all these quotations it would be presumptuous to conclude with some verses of my own, were they not offered, as the writer of the songs from which I have just quoted, remarks,—in the hope that they may elicit better. I have had the gratification more than once of hearing them sung, adapted to an Irish air, by one of the ablest dramatists and truest Shaksperians of the age. SONG FOR SHAKSPEARE'S BIRTHDAY. Ever since the dawn of time Have poets told their sylvan stories, And crowning man with living glories. Than his to whom all shapes were given Now a breathing violet here, And now a streaming star in heaven. The all-encircling line of Shakspeare ! At losing him—the gentle Shakspeare ! Oh! the brightest flame of life, It burns in those who best adore him ; Like snow melt all away before him. Yes, sure his pen was once a feather In the wing of Noah's dove, It links us so in peace together. Oh! the sweetness of his song, The music and the mirth of Shakspeare ! Golden word was never heard Like thy all-echoed name, my Shakspeare ! O'er the mind his magic breathed, And still it leaves a charm within it : As Apollo's harp bequeathed Its music where it laid a minute. Time shall never still the tone, Nor e'er of radiant wreaths deprive him; Nature was his nurse alone, And Nature only can survive him. Oh! the green, the glorious page, The everlasting line of Shakspeare! Millions meet, with praises sweet, Around thy sunny shrine, my Shakspeare ! I repeat my prayer to the reader, to Shakspereanize on the coming 23rd of April. Let him try the experiment-he will find it a pleasant and proper starting point for his summer enjoyments. "To conclude," in perfectly original phrase-if the suggestion I have thrown out should be the parent only of one meeting— if it should tempt only one lover of humanity to pay a hearty homage to its great Friend and Illustrator-my object will be attained. ANONYMOUS. Ques. What is your name? It has been advanced in a philosophic stanza, by one who knew how much of the vaunted elevation of man over his competitors of the air, earth, and waters, is comprised in the attribute of speech, that "words are things." And, considering their various and universal effects, it is at least as safe a proposition to support as the doctrine of another and more orthodox asserter, who would have us believe that Mont Blanc is merely a lump of imagination-a concentration of thoughts, or of the "stuff that dreams are made of"- -a handful of nonentity; and that Pompeii is nothing more nor less than an idea in ruins. Now whether Lord Byron or Bishop Berkeley may be said to have succeeded in loosening the Gordian knot of philosophy, or whether that object remains to be accomplished by time and Mr. Coleridge, it is a fact as certain as the progress of uncertainty itself, that the word, whose uses and perversions I am about to discuss, can never become part and parcel of any known or unknown system of physics or metaphysics. It is neither a thing-according to the peer; nor nothing as assumed by the prelate : neither a term referable to the discoveries of art or science, nor a name bestowed by Adam on anything God has made yet it is at once universal and individual in its application and properties. It represents nothing or everything-in the material and immaterial world while it unites in its signification the mockery and marvels, the shadows and solidity of both. It reveals to us the secret link between matter and mind, the inscrutable agency that impels the machinery of being. It possesses a substantive faculty, and requires not another word to be joined with it. The great arithmeticians of the earth would fail to estimate the infinite variety of causes and effects, of doubts and indecisions, of subtleties and evasions, that follow in the train of this one word Anonymous, and constitute it the Lord High Chancellor of our language. As little could they number or appreciate the manifold blessings it includes the outgrowings of feeling and fiction, the pleasantries that spring even out of pain, the changes and chances of our condition, the incidental friendships and communings with society, the hurried and unremembered symphonies that gladden us between the acts of life. The nine letters that compose it are emblematical of the nine Muses, but their dominion is more mysterious and unlimited; they preside in their collective glory over that profound and indefinite class of things, that have been received and sanctified at the living font of nature, but whose clime and complexion have never been entered in the nomenclature of man. Its four syllables are wafted on the four winds of heaven, and from the heart and centre of the universe it looks down in scorn upon the uncouth and incongruous designations of mankind-upon the distinctions of mere terms-and the eagerness with which we (most of us) hurry through the shaded and healthful seclusions of the world, to wither under the sultry superfluity of a title, or experimentalise on the namelessness of a name. It is the untalked-of, unromantic thing of the hour; yet, as a living poet sings about the bee, in verses that will last as long as the Iliad, "of ancestry Mysteriously remote and high ;" much older than "the tiger's paws, the lion's mane." It is anterior to mountains and valleys, to forests and flowers, to the winds and oceans. It was, ere a tongue had spoken or an ear heard; ere the live cataracts "blew their trumpets from the steeps," or the young nightingale had whispered its first love-notes to a rosebud; before vulgar and inharmonious names were given to the gentlest and most beautiful of nature's family; or harsh and rugged objects received their appellations from the lips of music. It is the elder brother of the Universe-the ancestor of Earth; it is nestled with Chaos in his cradle, and was contemporary with old Time before he was christened. It was originally employed to denote the absence of a name : at the present day it signifies a variety of things. On the one hand-indigence, inability, and the questioners of human right divine: on the other-opulence, intellect, and Sir Walter Scott. Methinks its genealogy would puzzle a society of antiquaries. The "rarer monsters" of the world, the giants and genii, are so impossibly remote, so undateably ancient, that we are reduced to the necessity of doubting whether they ever existed at all; and having no parish registers to refer to, we should, from its pre-Adamite antiquity, be sceptical as to the extraction of Anonymous itself, and might suspect that everything grew up originally with a natural label appended to it, specifying its name and qualifications; |