AT A SOLEMN MUSIC.1

BLEST pair of Sirens, pledges2 of heaven's joy,
Sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse,
Wed your divine sounds, and mixed power4 employ,
Dead things with imbreathed sense able to pierce;
And to our high-raised phantasy5 present
That undisturbed song of pure concent,6
Aye sung before the sapphire-coloured throne
To him that sits thereon,

With saintly shout and solemn jubilee :
Where the bright seraphim, in burning row,
Their loud uplifted angel-trumpets blow;
And the cherubic host, in thousand quires,
Touch their immortal harps of golden wires,
With those just Spirits that wear victorious palms,
Hymns devout and holy psalms

Singing everlastingly;

That we on earth, with undiscording voice,
May rightly answer that melodious noise ;8
As once we did, till disproportioned sin

Jarred against nature's chime, and with harsh din

Broke the fair music that all creatures made

To their great Lord, whose love their motion swayed

In perfect diapason, 10 whilst they stood

In first obedience, and their state of good.

(1) At a solemn music―i. e. lines written at, or on, a sacred concert or oratorio. (2) Pledges-i. e. earnests or foretastes of the joys of heaven.

(3) Wed your, &c.-Milton speaks in his "L'Allegro," of airs "married to immortal verse." (See p. 309.)

(4) Mixed power, &c.-i. e. employ your united power, which is able to penetrate and breathe life even into dead things. and to our, &c.

(5) Phantasy-the old spelling for fancy.

(6) Concent-from the Latin con, together, and centus (for cantus), singing, harmony-in allusion to Plato's conceit of the music of the spheres.

(7) Aye-always, ever.

(8) Noise-music. So the word used to be sometimes employed in prose. See Psalm xlvii. 5: "God is gone up with a merry noise, and the Lord with the sound of the trumpet."-Cranmer's version.

(9) Disproportioned-mismatched, disorderly.

(10) Diapason-from the Greek 8tá, through, and waσwv, of all-"the interval of the octave, so called because it includes all admitted musical sounds"-here, metaphorically, full harmony.

Oh! may we soon again renew that song,

And keep in tune with heaven, till God ere long
To his celestial concert us unite,

To live with him, and sing in endless morn of light!

Milton.

ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONT.1

AVENGE, O Lord! thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,2
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones,
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans3
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they

To Heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant ;4 that from these may grow
A hundred-fold, who, having learned thy way,
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.5

Milton.

TO A FRIEND.

WHEN we were idlers with the loitering rills
The need of human love we little noted:
Our love was nature, and the peace that floated
On the white mist, and dwelt upon the hills,

(1) This sublime prayer, as it may truly be called, was written on occasion of the barbarous massacre in 1665, inflicted by the Duke of Savoy on his Protestant subjects, the Vaudois.

(2) So pure of old-The Vaudois appear to have kept themselves separate from the church of Rome from time immemorial.

(3) Their moans, &c.—The simplicity of the expression, the fulness of meaning, and the fine movement of the verse, make this sentence truly sublime:

(4) The triple tyrant-the Pope. So designated, probably, from his wearing the triple crown.

(5) Babylonian woe-the woe denounced on the spiritual Babylon, which is by many considered to be the Roman Catholic church.

To sweet accord subdued our wayward wills:
One soul was ours, one mind, one heart devoted,
That, wisely doting,1 asked not why it doted,
And ours the unknown joy, which knowing kills.2
But now I find how dear thou wert to me;
That man is more than half of nature's treasure,
Of that fair beauty, which no eye can see,
Of that sweet music which no eye can measure
And now the streams may sing for others' pleasure,
The hills sleep on in their eternity!

;

Hartley Coleridge.

THE DEATH-BED.

WE watched her breathing through the night,

Her breathing soft and low,

As in her breast the wave of life

Kept heaving to and fro.

So silently we seemed to speak,
So slowly moved about,

As we had lent her half our powers
To eke her living out.

Our very hopes belied our fears,
Our fears our hopes belied-
We thought her dying when she slept,
And sleeping when she died.

For when the morn came, dim and sad,
And chill with early showers,

Her quiet eyelids closed-she had
Another morn than ours.

Hood.

(1) Wisely doting-to dote, connected with the Dutch dutten, and the French doter, radoter, probably meant originally to sleep, or dream, then to rave, to talk or act foolishly: hence the pointed antithesis, in the above phrase.

(2) This beautiful line reminds us of Gray's expression (see p. 127)—

"Where ignorance is bliss

"Tis folly to be wise;"

and also of the exquisite story of Cupid and Psyche, as told by Apuleius (book iv. 28). Psyche was perfectly happy in the love of Cupid, or Eros, until her curiosity prompted her to try to ascertain who he was-and then he vanished for ever!

NIGHT.

NIGHT is the time for rest;-
How sweet! when labours close,
To gather round an aching breast
The curtain of repose;

Stretch the tired limbs and lay the head
Upon our own delightful bed!

Night is the time for dreams;

The gay romance of life;

When truth that is, and truth that seems,

Blend in fantastic strife;

Ah! visions less beguiling far

Than waking dreams by daylight are!

1

Night is the time for toil;-
To plough the classic field,
Intent to find the buried spoil
Its wealthy furrows yield;
Till all is ours that sages taught,
That poets sang, or heroes wrought.

Night is the time to weep ;—
To wet with unseen tears

Those graves of memory where sleep

The joys of other years;

Hopes that were angels in their birth,

But perished young, like things of earth.

Night is the time for care ;-
Brooding on hours misspent,
To see the spectre of despair

Come to our lonely tent;

Like Brutus,1 'midst his slumbering host,
Startled by Cæsar's stalworth2 ghost.

(1) Like Brutus-In allusion to the phantom of Cæsar, which is said to have appeared to Brutus before the battle of Philippi.

(2) Stalworth-from the Anglo-Saxon stal-weorth, worth stealing or taking, and therefore (says Richardson), by inference-brave, strong, daring. Jamieson derives its equivalent stalwart from the Anglo-Saxon stalferhth, steel mind or spirit—a much more probable derivation.

M

Night is the time to pray ;-
Our Saviour oft withdrew
To desert mountains far away;
So will his followers do;

Steal from the throng to haunts untrod,
And hold communion there with God.

Night is the time for death ;-
When all around is peace,

Calmly to yield the weary breath,

From sin and suffering cease;

Think of heaven's bliss and give the sign

To parting friends-such death be mine!

DEATH OF AN INFANT.1

Montgomery.

DEATH found strange beauty on that infant brow,
And dashed it out. There was a tint of rose
On cheek and lip. He touched the veins with ice,
And the rose faded. Forth from those blue eyes
There spake a wishful tenderness, a doubt
Whether to grieve or sleep, which innocence
Alone may wear. With ruthless haste he bound
The silken fringes of those curtaining lids
For ever. There had been a murmuring sound
With which the babe would claim its mother's ear,
Charming her even to tears. The spoiler set
His seal of silence. But there beamed a smile
So fixed, so holy, from that cherub brow,
Death gazed and left it there;-he dared not steal
The signet ring of heaven.

Mrs. Sigourney.

EARLY RISING AND PRAYER.2

WHEN first thine eyes unveil, give thy soul leave
To do the like; our bodies but forerun
The spirit's duty; true hearts spread and heave
Unto their God, as flowers do to the sun;

(1) This subject has not often been more gracefully and tenderly handled than in the above lines. The picture here presented matches with that by the same elegant hand in p. 88.

(2) The author of these striking lines was a Welsh private gentleman who lived in the 17th century. It is rare to find so much meaning in so few words.