"The negro toils 'neath the scorching sun,
But he sees him set when the day is done:
Mariner thousands of white men here
Never behold his golden cheer;

Hewing the mines in the earth's dark cell,
Day is all night where the white slaves dwell.

"Digging and delving through life that we
May scatter our wealth, and shout, we're free;'
A mind-blighted, limb-twisted, barbarous race,
Born for their loathsome hiding-place.

Slavery! boast not its race is o'er,

For it dwelleth close to the good man's door.

66

Slavery! Mark ye that chimney tall,

Those narrow windows in that high wall!
See ye those wheels that go round and round,
With ever the same sharp whizzing sound:
A hundred children, when daylight's fled,
Go hence, but not one to a child's happy bed.

"There's slavery there, in that dim-lighted room,
While the streets are shrouded in midnight gloom;
In the fair young form, who, with swimming eyes,
By the glare of the lamp her needle plies;

On--on

-no rest! she must toil away,

Till the task is done, for the coming day.

66

Slavery! is it the same dark tale

"On the Afric shore,-in the English gaol?
Liberty! is it an empty sound?

Or hath it no meaning on British ground?
Oh! the gaol is the refuge the white slave's got,
Tho' he'd covet, without it, the negro's lot.

"Then, mariner, hence! and God prosper thee,
And strengthen thine arm against slavery!
But when thou art far on some alien strand,
Give back thy thoughts to thy native land;
And pray that the galling chain be riven,

That the white man's wealth to his kind has given.”

[Poe was born at Baltimore, U.S.A., about the year 1811, and left destitute when a mere child by his parents, who were strolling players. Adopted and sent to school by a Virginian planter, Mr. Allan, he was from the first ungrateful and unmanageable. He was expelled from a military academy in which Mr. Allan placed him; he enlisted in the army, then deserted and picked up a precarious living by contributing to American periodicals. His genius

made him many friends, but he kept none; he deceived and disgraced all he came in contact with; he was morbidly reckless, and his diseased imagination is reflected in his writings. He seems to have written as he lived, in a dream of intoxication, in which despondency alternated with savage hilarity, and in which nothing real had a part. He died October 7, 1849, in a hospital at Baltimore.]

HEAR the sledges with the bells--
Silver bells!

What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight.
Keeping time, time, time,

In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-

From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Hear the mellow wedding bells,
Golden bells!

What a world of happiness their harmony foretells:
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight!
From the molten-golden notes,
And all in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats

To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!

Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
How it swells!

How it dwells

On the Future! how it tells
Of the rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the bells, bells, bells,

Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-

To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!

Hear the loud alarum bells-
Brazen bells!

What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,

In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,

And a resolute endeavour,
Now-now to sit or never,
By the side of the pale-faced moon.
Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells
Of Despair!

How they clang, and clash, and roar!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air.
Yet the ear it fully knows,
By the twanging,

And the clanging,

How the danger ebbs

Yet the ear distinct'

In the jangling

And the wrangling,

flows;

How the danger sinks and swells,

By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells;
Of the bells-

Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells, bells,

In the clamour and the clangour of the bells,

Hear the tolling of the bells-
Iron bells!

What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night,

How we shiver with affright

At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats

From the rust within their throats

A
pæan from the bells!
And his merry bosom swells
With the pæan of the bells!
And he dances and he yells;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the pæan of the bells—
Of the bells :

Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells-
Keeping time, time, time,

As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells-
Of the bells, bells, bells-
To the tolling of the bells-
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells-
Bells, bells, bells-

To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

LAKE LEMAN BY NIGHT.

LORD BYRON.

[With Byron rose a new, more lofty, and more finished style of poetry than any that had preceded his, that of Shakspeare and Milton alone excepted. To the smooth versification of Pope he added the grandeur of imagery and the power of description. His first efforts, which were certainly but feeble, were sneered at by the Edinburgh Reviewers. In 1807, the "Hours of Idleness" was published; five years afterwards the opening Cantos of "Childe Harold' had "made him famous." "The Prisoner of Chillon," "Manfred," "Lament of Tasso," followed in rapid succession; then came the completion of "Childe Harold;" afterwards "Mazeppa," and the commencement of "Don Juan;" the latter defying public "proprieties," but astonishing the world by its bursts of poetic grandeur. Then came the Dramas, never intended for the stage, but which the cupidity of managers subsequently dragged upon the boards. Of Byron's ill-starred marriage and subsequent excesses, something too much has already been written. His whole life reads like a romance of the most startling kind; his death, an attack of fever, almost an inevitable consequence. He died in Greece 1824, at the age of thirty-six, and was buried in the family vault at Hucknall, near Newstead.]

CLEAR, placid Leman! that contrasted lake,
With the wild world I dwelt in, is a thing
Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake
Earth's troubled waters for a purer spring.
This quiet sail is as a noiseless wing

To waft me from distraction; once I loved
Torn ocean's roar, but thy soft murmuring
Sounds sweet as if a sister's voice reproved,

That I with stern delights should e'er have been so moved.

It is the hush of night, and all between
Thy margin and the mountains, dusk yet clear,
Mellow'd and mingling, yet distinctly seen,
Save darken'd Jura, whose capt heights appear
Precipitously steep; and drawing near,

There breathes a living fragrance from the shore,
Of flowers yet fresh with childhood; on the ear
Drops the light drip of the suspended oar,
Or chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more.
He is an evening reveller, who makes
His life an infancy, and sings his fill;

At intervals, some bird from out the brakes
Starts into voice a moment, then is still.
There seems a floating whisper on the hill,
But that is fancy, for the starlight dews
All silently their tears of love instil,
Weeping themselves away, till they infuse
Deep into nature's breast the spirit of her hues.

Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!
If in your bright leaves we would read the fate
Of men and empires,-'tis to be forgiven,
That in our aspirations to be great,
Our destinies o'erleap their mortal state,
And claim a kindred with you; for ye are
A beauty and a mystery, and create

In us such love and reverence from afar,

That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves a star.

All heaven and earth are still, though not in sleep,
But breathless as we grow when feeling most;
And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep
All heaven and earth are still. From the high host
Of stars, to the lull'd lake and mountain coast,
All is concenter'd in a life intense,

Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost,
But hath a part of being, and a sense
Of that which is of all Creator and defence.

Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt
In solitude, where we are least alone;

A truth, which through our being then doth melt,
And purifies from self: it is a tone,

The soul and source of music, which makes known
Eternal harmony, and sheds a charm,

Like to the fabled Cytherea's zone,

Binding all things with beauty:-'twould disarm The spectre Death, had he substantial power to harm.

Not vainly did the early Persian make

His altar the high places and the peak