Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni.

Hast thou a charm to stay the morning star
In his steep course? So long he seems to pause
On thy bald awful head, O sovran Blanc!
The Arve and Arveiron at thy base
Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful form!
Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines,
How silently! Around thee and above,
Deep is the air and dark, substantial, black,
An ebon mass; methinks thou piercest it,
As with a wedge! But when I look again,
It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine,
Thy habitation from eternity!

O dread and silent mount! I gazed upon thee,
Till thou, still present to the bodily sense,
Did'st vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer,
I worshipped the Invisible alone.

Ye ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow
Adown enormous ravines slope amain-
Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice,
And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge!
Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!

Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven

Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers
Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?
God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God!
God! sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome voice!
Ye pine groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!
And they, too, have a voice, yon piles of snow,
And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!

Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost ! Ye wild goats sporting round the eagle's nest! Ye eagles, playmates of the mountain storm! Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds! Ye signs and wonders of the element ! Utter forth God, and fill the hills with praise!

Once more, hoar mount! with thy sky-pointing peaks,

Oft from whose feet the avalanche, unheard,
Shoots downward, glittering through the pure serene,
Into the depth of clouds that veil thy breast-
Thou too, again, stupendous mountain! thou,
That as I raise my head, awhile bowed low
In adoration, upward from thy base,
Slow travelling with dim eyes suffused with tears,
Solemnly seemest, like a vapoury cloud,
To rise before me-Rise, O ever rise;
Rise, like a cloud of incense, from the earth!
Thou kingly spirit throned among the hills,
Thou dread ambassador from earth to heaven,
Great Hierarch! tell thou the silent sky,
And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun,
Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.

Love.

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
Are all but ministers of love,

And feed his sacred flame.

Oft in my waking dreams do I
Live o'er again that happy hour,
When midway on the mount I lay,

Beside the ruined tower.

The moonshine, stealing o'er the scene, Had blended with the lights of eve; And she was there, my hope, my joy, My own dear Genevieve!

She leaned against the armed man, The statue of the armed knight; She stood and listened to my lay Amid the lingering light.

Few sorrows hath she of her own,
My hope, my joy, my Genevieve!
She loves me best whene'er I sing

The songs that make her grieve.
I played a soft and doleful air,
I sang an old and moving story-
An old rude song that suited well
That ruin wild and hoary.

She listened with a flitting blush,
With downcast eyes and modest grace;
For well she knew I could not choose
But gaze upon her face.

I told her of the knight that wore Upon his shield a burning brand; And that for ten long years he wooed The lady of the land.

I told her how he pined; and ah! The deep, the low, the pleading tone With which I sang another's love, Interpreted my own.

She listened with a flitting blush,
With downcast eyes and modest grace;
And she forgave me that I gazed
Too fondly on her face.

But when I told the cruel scorn
Which crazed this bold and lovely knight,
And that he crossed the mountain-woods,
Nor rested day nor night;

But sometimes from the savage den,
And sometimes from the darksome shade,
And sometimes starting up at once,
In green and sunny glade,

There came and looked him in the face
An angel beautiful and bright;
And that he knew it was a fiend,
This miserable knight !

And that, unknowing what he did,
He leaped amid a murderous band,
And saved from outrage worse than death
The lady of the land;

And how she wept and clasped his knees,
And how she tended him in vain-
And ever strove to expiate

The scorn that crazed his brain.
And that she nursed him in a cave;
And how his madness went away,
When on the yellow forest leaves
A dying man he lay;

And this place our forefathers made for man!
This is the process of our love and wisdom
To each poor brother who offends against us-
Most innocent, perhaps-and what if guilty?
Is this the only cure? Merciful God!
Each pore and natural outlet shrivelled up
By ignorance and parching poverty,
His energies roll back upon his heart
And stagnate and corrupt, till, changed to poison,
They break on him like a loathsome plague-spot!
Then we call in our pampered mountebanks-
And this is their best cure! uncomforted
And friendless solitude, groaning and tears,
And savage faces at the clanking hour,
Seen through the steam and vapours of his dungeon
By the lamp's dismal twilight! So he lies
'Circled with evil, till his very soul
Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformed
By sights of evermore deformity!
With other ministrations thou, O Nature,
Healest thy wandering and distempered child :
Thou pourest on him thy soft influences,

Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets;
Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters;
Till he relent, and can no more endure
To be a jarring and a dissonant thing
Amid this general dance and minstrelsy;
But, bursting into tears, wins back his way,
His angry spirit healed and harmonised
By the benignant touch of love and beauty.

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With tender gladness thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe, shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and, by giving, making it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the evedrops fall,
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet moon.

Love, Hope, and Patience in Education.

O'er wayward childhood wouldst thou hold firm rule,
And sun thee in the light of happy faces;
Love, Hope, and Patience, these must be thy graces,
And in thine own heart let them first keep school.
For as old Atlas on his broad neck places
Heaven's starry globe, and there sustains it, so
Do these upbear the little world below
Of education-Patience, Love, and Hope.
Methinks I see them grouped in seemly show,
The straitened arms upraised, the palms aslope,
And robes that touching as adown they flow,
Distinctly blend, like snow embossed in snow.
O part them never! If Hope prostrate lie,
Love too will sink and die.
But Love is subtle, and doth proof derive
From her own life that Hope is yet alive;
And bending o'er, with soul-transfusing eyes,
And the soft murmurs of the mother dove,
Woos back the fleeting spirit, and half supplies;
Thus Love repays to Hope what Hope first gave to Love.
Yet haply there will come a weary day,

When overtasked at length
Both Love and Hope beneath the load give way.
Then with a statue's smile, a statue's strength,
Stands the mute sister, Patience, nothing loath,
And both supporting, does the work of both.

Youth and Age.

Verse, a breeze 'mid blossoms straying,
Where Hope clung feeding like a bee-
Both were mine! Life went a-Maying
With Nature, Hope, and Poesy,
When I was young!
When I was young? Ah, woful when !
Ah, for the change 'twixt now and then!
This breathing house not built with hands,
This body that does me grievous wrong,
O'er airy cliffs and glittering sands,
How lightly then it flashed along:
Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore,
On winding lakes and rivers wide,
That ask no aid of sail or oar,
That fear no spite of wind or tide!
Nought cared this body for wind or weather,
When Youth and I lived in't together.

Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like;
Friendship is a sheltering tree;

O! the joys that came down shower-like,
Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty,
Ere I was old!
Ere I was old! Ah, woful ere,
Which tells me Youth's no longer here!
O Youth! for years so many and sweet,
"Tis known that thou and I were one;
I'll think it but a fond conceit-
It cannot be that thou art gone!
Thy vesper-bell hath not yet tolled,
And thou wert aye a masker bold!
What strange disguise hast now put on,
To make believe that thou art gone?
I see these locks in silvery slips,
This drooping gait, this altered size;
But springtide blossoms on thy lips,
And tears take sunshine from thine eyes!
Life is but thought; so think I will
That Youth and I are housemates still.

Within whose walls, as their long labours close,
The wanderers of the ocean find repose,
We wore in social ease the hours away,
The passing visit of a summer's day.

Whilst some to range the breezy hill are gone,
I lingered on the river's marge alone;
Mingled with groups of ancient sailors gray,
And watched the last bright sunshine steal away.

As thus I mused amidst the various train
Of toil-worn wanderers of the perilous main,
Two sailors-well I marked them (as the beam
Of parting day yet lingered on the stream,
And the sun sunk behind the shady reach)-
Hastened with tottering footsteps to the beach.
The one had lost a limb in Nile's dread fight;
Total eclipse had veiled the other's sight
For ever! As I drew more anxious near,
I stood intent, if they should speak, to hear;
But neither said a word! He who was blind
Stood as to feel the comfortable wind
That gently lifted his gray hair: his face
Seemed then of a faint smile to wear the trace.

The other fixed his gaze upon the light
Parting; and when the sun had vanished quite,
Methought a starting tear that Heaven might bless,
Unfelt, or felt with transient tenderness,

Came to his aged eyes, and touched his cheek!
And then, as meek and silent as before,
Back hand-in-hand they went, and left the shore.
As they departed through the unheeding crowd,
A caged bird sung from the casement loud;
And then I heard alone that blind man say,
'The music of the bird is sweet to-day!'
I said, 'O Heavenly Father! none may know
The cause these have for silence or for wo!'
Here they appear heart-stricken or resigned
Amidst the unheeding tumult of mankind.

There is a world, a pure unclouded clime,
Where there is neither grief, nor death, nor time!
Nor loss of friends! Perhaps, when yonder bell
Beat slow, and bade the dying day farewell,
Ere yet the glimmering landscape sunk to night,
They thought upon that world of distant light;
And when the blind man, lifting light his hair,
Felt the faint wind, he raised a warmer prayer;
Then sighed, as the blithe bird sung o'er his head,
'No morn will shine on me till I am dead!'

ROBERT SOUTHEY.

One of the most voluminous and learned authors of this period was ROBERT SOUTHEY, LL.D., the poet-laureate. A poet, scholar, antiquary, critic, and historian, Mr Southey wrote more than even Scott, and he is said to have burned more verses between his twentieth and thirtieth year than he published during his whole life. His time was entirely devoted to literature. Every day and hour had its appropriate and select task; his library was his world within which he was content to range, and his books were his most cherished and constant compamons. In one of his poems, he says

My days among the dead are passed; Around me I behold,

Where'er these casual eyes are cast
The mighty minds of old:
My never-failing friends are they
With whom I converse night and day.

It is melancholy to reflect, that for nearly three years preceding his death, Mr Southey sat among his books in hopeless vacuity of mind, the victim of disease. This distinguished author was a native of Bristol, the son of a respectable shopkeeper, and

was born on the 12th of August 1774. He was indebted to a maternal uncle for most of his education. Having passed with credit through Westminster school, he was, in 1792, entered of Baliol college, Oxford. His friends designed him for the church; but the poet became a Jacobin and Socinian, and his academic career was abruptly closed in 1794.

Robert Southey

The same year he published a volume of poems in conjunction with Mr Robert Lovell, under the names of Moschus and Bion. About the same time he composed his poem of Wat Tyler, a revolutionary brochure, which was long afterwards published surreptitiously by a knavish bookseller to annoy its author. In my youth,' he says, 'when my stock of knowledge consisted of such an acquaintance with Greek and Roman history as is acquired in the course of a scholastic education; when my heart was full of poetry and romance, and Lucan and Akenside were at my tongue's end, I fell into the political opinions which the French revolution was then scattering throughout Europe; and following those opinions with ardour wherever they led, I soon perceived that inequalities of rank were a light evil compared to the inequalities of property, and those more fearful distinctions which the want of moral and intellectual

culture occasions between man and man. At that

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time, and with those opinions, or rather feelings (for their root was in the heart, and not in the understanding), I wrote Wat Tyler,' as one who was impatient of all the oppressions that are done under the sun. The subject was injudiciously chosen, and it was treated, as might be expected, by a youth of twenty in such times, who regarded only one side of the question.' The poem, indeed, is a miserable production, and was harmless from its very inanity. Full of the same political sentiments and ardour, Southey composed his Joan of Arc, an epic poem, displaying fertility of language and boldness of imagination, but at the same time diffuse in style, and in many parts wild and incoherent. In imitation of Dante, the young poet conducted his heroine in a dream to the abodes of departed spirits, and dealt very freely with the murderers of mankind,' from Nimrod the mighty hunter, down to the hero conqueror of Agincourt