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When sacred call the master sent away,
And gave the happy summer-holiday!
Some, lightly sped where on the orchard
steep

The shaken apples fell in pattering heap,
And lent their busy aid to gather in,
And fill'd their pouches too-a venial sin!
Some, by the river-bank as gaily fared,
And held deep converse with the laughing

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laird.

Some, to the glen with nut-hook in their hands;

Telling their tales the while, in merry bands, Drew the brown cluster down with breaking crush,

Or stain'd their lips with brambles from the bush.

Some more retir'd (and I might be of these) Lay on the wild bank, 'mid the hum of bees, Reading some legend old of Scottish fame, The Bruce, the Douglas, and each warrior name;

Then homewards with the setting sun, to hear The solemn ev'ning duly clos'd with prayer! O why should pleasure youth's wild eye allure

From Nature's guardian arms to scenes less

pure?

Why should our manhood be ambition's slave, Or creep the drudge of avarice to the grave? Why should the sun on man's unconscious

gaze,

Pour from the eastern hill his living rays? Or why his softening splendour gild the west, Nor raise one wish that such may be our rest? Ah! far at sea, and wanderers from the shore, Nature still calls us, but we hear no more? Yet where her pensive look reflection throws, Remember'd forms of beauty yield repose; On them she pauses, and with filling eye, Plans the blest refuge of futurity!

Thus to the scenes in which our childhood past,

Memory returns with love that still can last; Wherever, since, our vagrant course has been, Whatever troubled hours have come between, Those simple beauties, which could first engage

Our hearts, still please through each suc

ceeding age;

Nor are they yet so sunk in meaner care, That nature's image quit its impress there!" There is much feeling in the following passage;

"Can I forget the hallow'd hour I past In Grasmere chapel, in the lonely waste, Driven by the rains that patter'd on the lake, (Perhaps no holier cause) repose to take? The simple people to each separate hand Divided, youths and maids in different band; Of the great power of God, their pastor spoke; Responsive from the hills loud thunders broke,

From the black-smoking hills whose wavering line

Through lead-bound panes was dimly seen to shine.

I felt the voice of Man and Nature roll The deep conviction on my bending soul!

What if, amid the rural tribe, unknown, From Wordsworth's eye some moral glory shone,

Some beam of poesy and good combin'd, That found the secret foldings of my mind?"

We shall finish our quotations from this part of the volume, with a short, vivid, and accurate, picture of one of the most beautiful scenes in the south of Scotland.

"How laugh'd thine eyes, when from the Where sunk in shade retiring Leader fell, bushy dell, Our wheels slow wound us up the open height,

Whence Tweed's rich valley burst upon the sight.

Below, the river roll'd in spreading pride, The lofty arch embrac'd its auburn tide: Bright in the orient gleam the waters shone, Here flowing free, there ridg'd with shelvEach side the banks with fields and trees ing stone,

were green,

High waving on the hills were harvests seen; The nodding sheaf mov'd heavily along, And jocund reapers sang their morning song, Calm slept the clouds on cloven Eildon laid, And distant Melrose peep'd from leafy shade."

The translations are, we think, more unequal than the original compositions, some of them being excessively bad, and others most admirable. The cause of this seems to have been an occasional desire to indulge in fantastic ingenuity of versification and expression, in which the worthy Translator not unfrequently exhibits a most portentous forgetfulness of common sense, and employs a sort of language to our ears wholly unintelligible. When not beset by these unlucky fits of ingenuity, he catches the spirit of the original with great felicity; and his translations, or rather imitations of Horace, are indisputably the most elegant and graceful of any in the English language. He has proved, by his translations of several of the Odes, "how gracefully any short and classical composition may be arranged in a form which at once insures brevity, and unites elegance with the most varied and perfect melody of versification." What can be finer than the air he has thrown over the 32 Ode of Book I. "Possimus si quid," &c.

"O lyre, if vacant in the leafy shade,
We've us'd thy ministry in many a strain,
Not speedily to die, come yet again,
And let the Latian song thy chords pervade :
By him of Lesbos first harmonious made,
The warrior bard, who, on the tented plain,

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Or thrown ashore dripping from the rough main,

Still pour'd the lay with thy all-powerful aid In praise of Bacchus and the heavenly Nine, And made bright Venus and her boy his theme,

And sang his black-eyed love with locks of jet;

O shell, soft trembling in the hands divine Of Phoebus, at the feasts of Jove supreme, Sweet nurse of care, favour thy suppliant yet !"

We cannot refrain from quoting another, perhaps still more beautiful. "Fount of Bandusia, crystalline, most pure, Worthy wine-offerings, and the flower-wove wreath!

To-morrow, vow'd to thee, a kid beneath The knife shall bleed, whose swelling brows

mature

Bud with their primal horns, and seem se

cure

Of future fight, and love already breathe Wanton: Vain presage! for he soon in death Shall stain thy streams with ruddy drops impure.

Thy icy streams the dog stars burning hour Afflicts not; in their cool the toil'd ox laves His scorched sides; thy shades refresh the flocks.

Fame too is thine, if aught the poet's power Who sings thy dipping oaks, romantic caves, And prattling rills light-leaping from their rocks."

In his translation of a Chorus in the Phenissæ of Enripides, he has endeavoured, and we think successfully, to trace a strong resemblance to a celebrated passage in Shakspeare. "Grim visag'd war, wherefore do blood and

death

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The translation from Tyrtæus is very dull, but the fault is in the original. Tyrtæus, it is said, roused the martial enthusiasm of the Spartans by his poetry. If so, it is a proof that the Spartans had no taste-for nothing can be heavier and more spiritless than his remains. The Poet-Laureate, Pye, translated some of those martial effusions with kindred lumpishness—and a few lines read to a volunteer company by 'their Colonel, set the soldiers into a sound sleep on parade. Polwhele rendered them still more somniferous, for they overcame the wakefulness of the Cornish miners; and, recited them in choice English to two lastly, Professor Young of Glasgow hundred sleeping tyros, in the Greek class-room of that university. We had forgotten Mr Charles Elton, who himself fell fairly asleep during the process of translation-and the present version seems to have been made between a snore and a yawn, and is the most powerful soporific in the whole materia poetica. We decline quoting any part of it, lest our readers should be unable to peruse the rest of this article.

The Translator, however, soon gets upon better ground, and gives us about twenty select sonnets from Petrarch. We have compared his translations with those of Mrs Dobson, Dr Nott, and many anonymous writers, and they far outshine them all, both in fidelity and elegance. It is a most miserable mistake, to believe that Petrarch has no genuine sensibility. Is not his 24th Sonnet of Book II. most pathetic? It is thus exquisitely rendered : "The

eyes, the arms, the hands, the feet, the face, Which made my thoughts and words so warm and wild,

That I was almost from myself exil'd,
And render'd strange to all the human race:
The lucid locks that curl'd in golden grace,
The lightening beam that when my angel
smil'd

Diffus'd o'er earth an Eden heavenly mild : What are they now? Dust, lifeless dust, alas !

And I live on! a melancholy slave,
Reft of the lovely light that cheer'd the wave;
Tost by the tempest in a shatter'd bark,
The flame of genius, too, extinct and dark.
Here let my rays of love conclusion have;
Mute be the lyre; tears best my sorrows

mark."

One other quotation, and we must say good-bye to this accomplished scholar and gentleman.

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Sacred Songs. By THOMAS MOORE, Esq. and Sir JOHN STEVENSON, Mus. Doc. J. Power, 34, Strand. Price £1, 1s.

"CONTEMPLATIVE piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical," &c."The essence of poetry is inventionsuch invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights. The topics of devotion are few, and, being few, universally known: but few as they are, they can be made no more; they can receive no grace from novelty of sentiment, and very little from novelty of expression."*

So says Dr Johnson. It is happy for the world, that, in spite of the prognostics of literary prophets, there is something in the mind of man too buoyant to be borne down by any of those impossibilities which have been conjured up by a host of cool unimaginative critics. It is idle to tell us what cannot be done in the walks of imagination, or what is the point at which the poet's power of illustration must stop. If any were to assert, in

• Johnson's Lives of the poets, vol. i. p. 275, 8vo edition.

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these days, that because Sternhold and Hopkins, and Tate and Brady, were eminently pious and devotional versifiers, therefore all that is to be said in poetry, on the subject of devotion, had been said by them, we should all see the absurdity of such a declaration; and equally arbitrary and unjust, it appears to us, is the assertion we have quoted. The doctrines of religion may. be few and simple: the analogies, the combinations, the reflections, which they suggest to the mind of cultivated man, are boundless as its powers of There are some indivienjoyment. duals, it is true, who regard the imagination as so dangerous a foe to true religion, that they will not allow her how often men of taste appear among any place in their systems. Observing literal enough to suppose, that the less I the opponents of religion, they seem the taste is cultivated, the more devodraw the line closer and closer, sepaHence they rating what is beautiful from what is true, and discarding every flower which might have been bound round the majestic front of Truth, without any diminution of her dignity. It is perfectly true, that, in the reception of articles of belief, we should look to no records less variable than those of divine revelation. Let our first principles be as simple as possible. Let not the traditions of men, however pleasing to our own imaginations, be any thing more to us than subjects of interesting Let all that we know speculation.

tional we shall become.

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by nature of the Being that made us, bow down to that revealed delineation of his attributes with which the Scriptures present us. But grant that our faith is fixed by these unerring standards, and where is the harm of resorting to those affecting associations-of striking those strings within us, to which we have recourse when we wish to awaken inferior recollections; We must give religion all the advantage we can. In the world she will have

enemies, and none more sturdy than those who, if they knew her as she is, would hail her as the source of the most noble conceptions. We will not sacrifice one iota of her simplicity for the sake of dressing her up for the acceptance of men of the world; but let her not be known to men of genius as the foe of a chastened and pure imagination.

We regard the volume before us as

It

something quite new in its kind. may perhaps soften down some "stubborn prejudices." Here is a poet, a man of unquestioned genius, bringing in his first, and, we trust, sincere offering at the shrine of devotion. Whether he has lost his fire, his tenderness, and his originality, in exchanging the subjects on which he exercised them for others of far transcending excellence, our readers must judge-more, however, from a perusal of the collection of "Sacred Songs," than from the few specimens we can give. Contemplative piety," says Dr Johnson, "cannot be poetical." In opposition to this doctrine, we cannot forbear citing the following song:

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"So grant me, God, from every stain
Of sinful passion free,
Aloft, through virtue's purer air,
To steer my course to Thee!
No sin to cloud, no lure to stay
My soul as home she springs,
Thy sunshine on her joyful way,
Thy freedom on her wings!"

There is a very beautiful and affecting tribute to the memory of a young girl in the author's neighbourhood, who was carried off, a few weeks after her marriage, by a fever. We should

The carrier pigeon, it is well known, flies at an elevated pitch, in order to sur mount every obstacle between her and the place for which she is destined,-MOORE.

regret that it is not in our power to make room for it, but that it is idle to suppose our pages can give celebrity to compositions such as this. There are some exquisite stanzas also, beginning, "O thou who driest the mourner's tear," which will probably be the most popular in the collection, from their touching delineation of feelings, which we have all, or most of us, at one time or other experienced. Our readers may recollect a passage in "The Antiquary," in which Edie Ochiltree compares the flowers that smell sweetest by moonlight to the good deeds of men, and show fairest in adversityin the darkness of sin, and the decay

of tribulation." Somewhat similar is the idea in the following stanza :

"That, broken heart, Which, like the plants that throw Their fragrance from the wounded part, Breathes sweetness out of wo."

We must conclude here, however. The temptation to transcribe is almost irresistible, but we must resist it; and we trust that the collection before us will be better known than we can make it by our extracts. The greatest defect of Mr Moore's style, and one which is least of all tolerable in devotional poetry, is too much studied ornament. His metaphors are generally correct, and always ingenious; but they sometimes want that natural freshness which flows from immediate inspiration, and they not unfrequently approach to absolute conceits. Like several others of our most distinguished living poets, he is also a good deal of a mannerist, and too much addicted to copy from himself. But these faults are less apparent in the present than in any of Mr Moore's minor publications; and we look forward with considerable interest to the progress and termination of a work which has been so well begun.

Harrington, a Tale; and Ormond, a Tale; in 3 vols. By MARIA EDGEWORTH, &c. London, Hunter, &c. 1817.

(Concluded from page 522.)

THE Scene of the second tale is laid chiefly in Ireland; and it is, of course, infinitely more interesting than her elaborate apology for the Jews. Miss Edgeworth delights in delineating Irish

manners, with which she is most thoroughly acquainted, and which she appears to exhibit in all their varieties, with perfect truth of colouring. To no writer, indeed, are the Irish so much indebted as to Miss Edgeworth, for representing their national character in its proper light. Their less judicious patrons have generally repelled, in a storm of indignation, the obloquy pointed against them; and, wishing to exhibit only the bright side of their character, have thrown before all their faults the cloud of national partiality, and thus magnified them, to the eye of prejudice, by the additional obscurity through which they were viewed. Miss Edgeworth, on the contrary, always appears to take it for granted that the prejudices against her countrymen arise entirely from their being imperfectly known; and without claiming to them any thing like perfection, seems, with an air of the most insinuating candour, to present their virtues and their vices alike undisguised.

own son.

Ormond, the hero of this tale, had lost his mother in his infancy, while his father was in India. Sir Ulick O'Shane, Captain Ormond's early friend, had taken the child from the nurse to whose care it was left, and had brought up little Harry at Castle Hermitage with his own son, as his "He had been his darling, literally his spoiled child: nor had this fondness passed away with the prattling playful graces of the child's first years; it had grown with his growth." Sir Ulick, however, though naturally kind, had long been a political schemer. He had shifted with every change of ministry, and engaged in successive plans for his own aggrandisement, till his necessities became as great as his ambition-a passion to which all his other feelings were kept in strict subordination. With all the accommodating versatility of a courtier, he possessed talents and accomplishments which, with more prudence and better principles, might have rendered him eminently respectable, and given him unlimited influence in the political management of the district in which his property lay. In his earlier years he had possessed, in a high degree, the art of insinuating himself into the delicate female heart;

"And the fame of former conquests still operated in his favour, though he had long since passed his splendid meridian of gal

lantry. To go no farther than his legitimate loves, he had successively won three wives, who had each in their (her) turn been desperately enamoured. The first he loved, and married imprudently for love, at seventeen. The second he admired, and married prudently for ambition at thirty. The third he hated, but married from necessity for money at forty-five. The first wife, Miss Annaly, after ten years' martyrdom of the heart, sunk, childless-a victim, it was said, to love and jealousy. The second wife, Lady Theodosia, struggled stoutly for power, backed by strong and high connexions; having moreover the advantage of being a mother, and mother of an only son an heir," &c.

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This son, named Marcus, had been from childhood the companion of Harry Ormond; but their tempers and dispositions were in every respect opposite. Ormond, though hasty and violent, was warm-hearted, frank, and unsuspecting. Marcus was selfish, designing, insolent, and vindictive.

At the opening of the story, we are introduced to a party at Castle Hermitage, of which the principal personages were Lady Annaly and her daughter, relations of Sir Ülick's first wife, since whose death they had never till now visited the baronet, with whose treatment of their relative they had every reason to be displeased. Miss Annaly was a young lady of great beauty and accomplishments; and for these, and still weightier reasons, Sir Ulick was anxious to effect a union between her and his son. One day, during this reconciliation visit, Ormond and Marcus had been engaged to celebrate the birth-day of Mr Cornelius O'Shane, who whimsically styled himself the King of the Black Islands-" next to Sir Ulick, the being upon earth to whom Harry Ormond thought himself most obliged, and to whom he felt himself most attached." While the party at Castle Hermitage were making preparations for dancing, and Sir Ulick was anxiously waiting for the return of his son to lead off with Miss Annaly, they were startled by a bloody figure tapping at the window, and peremptorily demanding the keys of the gate, which Lady O'Shane had caused to be locked. Miss Annaly sat opposite the window at which this figure appeared. "For Heaven's sake, what's the matter?" cried Sir Ulick, on seeing Miss Annaly grow suddenly as pale as death. They rose, and, accompanied by Lady O'Shane, and

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