THE HOMERIC HEXAMETER DESCRIBED AND
EXEMPLIFIED.1

FROM THE GERMAN OF SCHILLER.

STRONGLY it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows, Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean. Coleridge.

THE OVIDIAN ELEGIAC METRE DESCRIBED AND EXEMPLIFIED.2

FROM THE GERMAN OF SCHILLER.

IN the Hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column;
In the Pentameter aye falling in melody back.

ON A CATARACT.3

FROM THE GERMAN OF STOLBERG.

UNPERISHING Youth !4

Thou leapest from forth

The cell of thy hidden nativity;

Never mortal saw

The cradle of the strong one;

Coleridge.

(1) Though brief, these specimens of versification are of rare beauty, and finely exemplify the flexibility of our native tongue.

The scheme is :

The original German is subjoined :

"Schwindelnd trägt er dich fort auf rastlos strömenden Wogen;
Hinter dir siehst du, du siehst vor dir nur Himmel und Meer."

(2) The scheme here is :

The German is:

"Im Hexameter steigt des Springquells flüssige Säule;

Im Pentameter drauf fällt sie melodisch herab."

(3) These lines-a transfusion rather than a translation of Stolberg's conceptions -as a specimen of pure rhythm without rhyme, are perhaps unparalleled in the English language. They are musical, vigorous, and in every sense adapted to the subject; even, perhaps, in their occasional obscurity.

(4) Unperishing youth-i. e. the torrent is boldly personified as a sort of infant Hercules.

Never mortal heard

The gathering of his voices;

The deep murmured1 charm of the son of the rock,
That is lisped evermore at his slumberless fountain.
There's a cloud at the portal, a spray-woven veil
At the shrine of his ceaseless renewing;

It embosoms2 the roses of dawn,

It entangles the shafts of the noon,

And into the bed of its stillness

The moonshine sinks down as in slumber,

That the son of the rock, that the nursling of heaven,

May be born in a holy twilight!

Coleridge.

AGAINST CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

THE heart is hard in nature, and unfit
For human fellowship, as being void
Of sympathy, and therefore dead alike
To love and friendship both, that is not pleased
With sight of animals enjoying life,

Nor feels their happiness augment his own.

I would not enter on my list of friends
(Though graced with polished manners and fine sense,
Yet wanting sensibility), the man

Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.
An inadvertent step may crush the snail
That crawls at evening in the public path;
But he that has humanity, forewarned,
Will tread aside, and let the reptile live.
Ye, therefore, who love mercy, teach your sons
To love it too. The spring time of our years
Is soon dishonoured and defiled in most

By budding ills, that ask a prudent hand
To check them. But, alas! none sooner shoots,
If unrestrained, into luxuriant growth,
Than cruelty, most devilish of them all.
Mercy to him that shows it,3 is the rule
And righteous limitation of its act,

(1) Deep murmured, &c.—the gurgling of the water on issuing from the spring. (2) Embosoms, &c.—i. e. the veil of mist catches the rosy tints of the morning,

as well as the more direct beams of noon.

(3) "Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy." Matt. v. 7.

By which heaven moves in pardoning guilty man;
And he that shows none, being ripe in years,
And conscious of the outrage he commits,
Shall seek it, and not find it in his turn.

THE SOUTH AFRICAN DESERT.1

AFAR in the desert I love to ride,
With the silent bush-boy alone by my side:
Away-away from the dwellings of men,

By the wild deer's haunt, by the buffalo's glen;
By valleys remote, where the oribi? plays,

Cowper.

Where the gnu, the gazelle, and the hartebeest graze,
And the kudu and eland unhunted recline

By the skirts of grey forests o'erhung with wild vine;
Where the elephant browses at peace in his wood,
And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood,
And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will
In the fen where the wild ass is drinking his fill.
There is rapture to vault on the champing steed,
And to bound away with the eagle's speed,
With the death-fraught firelock in my hand-
The only law of the desert land.

Afar in the desert I love to ride,

With the silent bush-boy alone by my side:
O'er the brown Karroo, where the bleating cry
Of the springbok's fawn sounds plaintively;
Where the zebra wantonly tosses his mane
As he scours with his troop o'er the desolate plain;
And the timorous quagga's shrill whistling neigh
Is heard by the fountain at twilight grey;
And the fleet-footed ostrich over the waste
Speeds like a horseman who travels in haste,
Hieing away to the home of her rest,

Where she and her mate have scooped their nest,
Far hid from the pitiless plunderer's view,

In the pathless depths of the parched Karroo.

(1) The desert in South Africa referred to in these spirited lines is the great

Karroo.

(2) Oribi, &c.—The animals named in this and in the next two lines are all species of antelopes.

And here while the night-winds around me sigh,
And the stars burn bright in the midnight sky,
As I sit apart by the desert stone,

Like Elijah at Horeb's cave alone,

"A still small voice" comes through the wild—
Like a father consoling his fretful child-
Which banishes bitterness, wrath and fear,
Saying "MAN IS DISTANT, BUT GOD IS NEAR!"

Pringle.

A MOONLIGHT NIGHT.

How calmly gliding through the dark blue sky
The midnight moon ascends! her placid beams
Through thinly scattered leaves and boughs grotesque,
Mottle with mazy shades the orchard slope;
Here, o'er the chestnut's fretted foliage grey
And massy, motionless they spread; here, shine
Upon the crags, deepening with blacker night
Their chasms; and there the glittering argentry1
Ripples and glances on the confluent streams.
A lovelier, purer light than that of day
Rests on the hills; and oh, how awfully
Into that deep and tranquil firmament
The summits of Auseva rise serene!
The watchman on the battlements partakes
The stillness of the solemn hour; he feels
The silence of the earth, the endless sound
Of flowing water soothes him; and the stars,

Which, in that brightest moonlight well-nigh quenched,
Scarce visible, as in the utmost depth

Of yonder sapphire infinite, are seen,
Draw on with everlasting influence
Towards eternity the attempered mind.

Southey.

SOLITUDE.

To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest's shady scene,
Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne'er or rarely been;

(1) Argentry—from the Latin argentum, silver-the silvery radiance.

To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;

Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean;—
This is not solitude-'tis but to hold

Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unrolled.

But 'midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men,1
To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess,

And roam along, the world's tired denizen,2
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless;
Minions of splendour, shrinking from distress!
None that, with kindred consciousness endued,
If we were not, would seem to smile the less,
Of all that flattered, followed, sought, and sued ;-
This is to be alone; this, this is solitude!

Byron.

THE FLOWERS OF THE FIELD.

SWEET nurslings of the vernal skies,
Bathed in soft airs, and fed with dew,
What more than magic in you lies,
To fill the heart's fond view!
In childhood's sports, companions gay,
In sorrow, on life's downward way,
How soothing! in our last decay
Memorials prompt and true.

Relics ye are of Eden's bowers,
As pure, as fragrant, and as fair,
As when ye crowned the sunshine hours
Of happy wanderers there.

Fallen all beside the world of life

How is it stained with fear and strife!

In reason's world what storms are rife,
What passions rage and glare!

(1) "For," says Lord Bacon, "a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures:" and he quotes in confirmation the Latin adage, “Magna civitas, magna solitudo." See " Essay on Friendship."

(2) Denizen-supposed to be connected with the French donaison, a gift or present-one who has obtained enfranchisement, a stranger made free. The "world's denizen" is one admitted to the rights and privileges of the world, but still feeling that he is an alien, and not a native.