No monument was there to say. The King of Macedon had heard Of gold and silver there— But these were dreams of humbler men; Not such his treasures were: Beside him lay two Scythian bows, A scimetar, a shield; With these he bore the nations down, And won the tested field. The youthful monarch grasp'd his spear, His kindred soul on fire; A thousand thoughts around him throng, Awaking high desire: May I but live as he hath lived, And die as he hath died,- All our young poets are fine, unaffected fellows, full of force and fire; and they would all, every mother's son of them, disdain themselves, did their consciences convict them of the sin of a single stanza, indited purposely to mystify some worthless truism, through the embroidered veil of its envelopement of gorgeous and gaudy words. The SUMPHS are all now of the Shelley, or of the Tennyson school and, hear, O heavens! and give ear, O earth! disciples of WORDSWORTH! Surely the soles of the feet of at least half a score of them must now be tingling, prescient of the bastinado. They are all classical scholars, too, and keep chirping about Chapman's Homer. Now here are stanzas-by one of our young poets-conceived in the true classical spirit. The heart-strings of Ovid would thrill to hear such a lament from his own Enone. CENONE. On the holy mount of Ida, Where the pine and cypress grow, Sate a young and lovely maiden, Weeping ever, weeping low. Drearily throughout the forest Did the winds of autumn blow, And the clouds above were flying, And Scamander rolled below. "Faithless Paris! cruel Paris!" Thus the poor deserted spake"Wherefore thus so strangely leave me? Why thy loving bride forsake? Why no tender word at partingWhy no kiss, no farewell take? Would that I could but forget theeWould this throbbing heart might break! "Is my face no longer blooming? Are my eyes no longer bright? Ah! my tears have made them dimmer, And my cheeks are pale and white. I have wept since early morning, I will weep the livelong night; Now I long for sullen darkness, As I once have longed for light. "Paris! art thou then so cruel? Fair, and young, and kind thou artCan it be that in thy bosom Lies so cold, so hard a heart? Children were we bred togetherShe who bore me suckled thee; I have been thine old companion, When thou hadst no more but me. Pictured there with lively grace, Sang the old and mournful tale, Theseus' self might weep for me! Thou may'st find another maiden With a fairer face than mine With a gayer voice, and sweeter, And a spirit liker thine: Lost and broken is the spell; That will love thee half so well. "O thou hollow ship that bearest Paris o'er the faithless deep! Wouldst thou leave him on some island Where alone the waters weep; Where no human foot is moulded In the wet and yellow sandLeave him there, thou hollow vessel! Leave him on that lonely land! "Then his heart will surely soften, When his foolish hopes decay, And his older love rekindle, As the new one dies away. Visionary hills will haunt him, Unto Ida and to me! "O! that like a little swallow I could reach that lonely spot! All his errors would be pardoned, All the weary past forgot. Never should he wander from meNever should he more depart; For these arms would be his prison, And his home would be my heart!" Thus lamented fair Enone, Weeping ever-weeping lowOn the holy mount of Ida, Where the pine and cypress grow. In the self same hour, Cassandra Shrieked her prophecy of woe, And into the Spartan dwelling Did the faithless Paris go. But what volume is this you are handling, Master Neophyte? Oh! Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. Read aloud the passage at your righthand thumb. "We sympathize even with the dead, and overlooking what is of real importance in their situation, that awful futurity which awaits them, we are chiefly affected by those circumstances which strike our senses, but can have no influence upon their happiness. It is miserable, we think, to be deprived of the light of the sun; to be shut out from life and conversation; to be laid in the cold grave, a prey to corruption and the reptiles of the earth; to be no more thought of in this world, but to be obliterated, in a little time, from the affections, and almost from the memory, of their dearest friends and relations. Surely, we imagine, we can never feel too much for those who have suffered so dreadful a calamity. The tribute of our fellow-feeling seems doubly due to them now, when they are in danger of being forgot by every body; and, by the vain honours which we pay to their memory, we endeavour, for our own misery, artificially to keep alive our melancholy remembrance of their misfortune. That our sympathy can afford them no consolation seems to be an addition to their calamity; and to think that all we can do is unavailing, and that, what alleviates all other distress, the regret, the love, and the lamentations of their friends, can yield no comfort to them, serves only to exasperate our sense of their misery. The happiness of the dead, however, most assuredly, is affected by none of these circumstances; nor is it the thought of these things which can ever disturb the profound security of their repose. The idea of that dreary and endless melancholy, which the fancy naturally ascribes to their condition, arises altogether from our joining to the change which has been produced that change, from our putting ourupon them our own consciousness of selves in their situation, and from our lodging, if I may be allowed to say so, our own living souls in their inanimatwould be our emotions in this case. It ed bodies, and thence conceiving what is from this very illusion of the imagination that the foresight of our own dissolution is so terrible to us, and that the idea of those circumstances, which undoubtedly can give us no pain when we are dead, makes us miserable while we are alive. And from thence arises one of the most important principles in human nature, the dread of death, the great poison to the happiness, but the great restraint upon the injustice of mankind, which, while it afflicts and mortifies the individual, guards and protects the society." Ay, there are not many now alive who could write so-yet the book has fallen into the sere and yellow leafand 'tis now with few a familiar name. Let us hear what he says of Sympathy. "Pity and compassion are words appropriated to signify our fellow feeling with the sorrow of others. Sympathy, though its meaning was, perhaps, originally the same, may now, however, without much impropriety, be made use of to denote our fellow feeling with any passion whatever." This is the use of the terin in its largest and its philosophic sense. But as it is at variance with what used to be its popular meaning, in which it was restricted to the participation in others' joy and grief, what are the circumstances which may have given occasion to this limitation, in language, of so comprehensive a passion? Because sorrow and joy, are the most marked and frequent states of feeling which occasion our sympathy, and, therefore the most noticed in common apprehension:further, they are the result of passions, and when we see the state produced, we are touched with the absolute condition in which we see the human being. Joy, we admit, as in itself a good, and sorrow, as in itself an evil. Besides joy and grief, being the common condition of all passions, are, of course, as frequent as the sum of all other passions; and hence, our sympathy with these is so much more marked to common apprehension, that it is no wonder the tendency of language should be to confine the word to an acceptation peculiar to the most frequent appearance of the affection. These are the beautiful forms of sympathy; in which she appears as a gracious angel treading the sorrowful earth, with feet of healing and eyes of light. Joy and sorrow make up the lot of our mortal estate, and by our sympathy with these, we seem to acknowledge our brotherhood with our species. But we do more. For by the force of this principle, those on whom the happier lot of humanity has fallen, communicate the bounty that has been showered on their head, and the wretched is not left alone with the burthen of his misery. The strength that is untasked, lends itself to divide the load under which another is bowed; and the calamity that lies on the heads of men is lightened, while those who are not called to bear, are yet willing to involve themselves in the sorrows of a brother. There are, indeed, states of mind in which we dare not look even on its smiling countenance-that glad light affording so strong a contrast to the darkness of our own spirits. When we leave the chamber in which lie the cold remains of one in life tenderly beloved, we start back in anguish from the cheerful sunshine and the sky so serenely and happily beautiful. And so it often is, in the common intercourse of life, when, without such deep cause of sorrow, perhaps, we are sometimes assailed with the expression of a joy which has no place in our hearts. But this proves how dear is happiness to the human heart. And it is wonderful even to the sufferer himself, to feel how his soul, that at first sullenly repelled the light of gladness, soon admits it unconsciously into all its depths, and is beguiled into a blessed forgetfulness of trouble. There are a thousand other cures which nature graciously provides for grief; but we speak now of that contagion of happiness that is breathed from the gentle voice, the sparkling eye, and the kindling smile and which so touches the breast with a cheerful sympathy, that the wretch almost upbraids himself for his inward gladness, as if false to the sorrow which he thinks he ought to have cherished more sacredly within his miserable heart. It has been too positively stated by Smith that, in order to sympathize with others, it is necessary we should place ourselves, in idea, in their situation. He sets out with endeavouring to establish this point, and takes, in particular, the case of the utmost cxhibition of agony which we can witnessa fellow creature upon the rack. "As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when wo have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. For as to be in pain or distress of any kind excites the most excessive sorrow, so to conceive or to imagine that we are in it, excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or dullness of the conception." It does not appear to us that such a process as this is necessary to produce the agony of mind, with which we might look on such a dreadful spectacle, although it is true that, in cases of such excessive suffering of physical nature, there is even a physical affection of our own bodies, of which the nerves themselves are shaken with what we behold. But we believe that the sight of such suffering as that here described directly awakens sympathy with the sufferer, without any such laborious and dilatory process as that described-it being sufficient for us to know that he is a sentient being like ourselves. No doubt, if we are driven on by the extremity of our physical sympathy to conceive what may be the kind of agonies which the poor wretch endures, then an immediate and direct reference is made to ourselves-our own limbs-our own bones-our own heart. But surely no two things can be more distinct than our general sympathy with the supposed pain, which we know must be dreadful, and that definite conception of the nature of that pain which we may be excited to endeavour to form. The illustrious author soon after uses another illustration of his doctrine, which seems even less conclusive. "Of all the calamities to which the condition of mortality exposes mankind, the loss of reason appears to those who have the least spark of humanity by far the most dreadful; and they behold that last stage of human wretchedness with deeper commiseration than any other. But the poor wretch who is in it, laughs and sings perhaps, and is altogether insensible of his own misery. The anguish which humanity feels, therefore, at the sight of such an object cannot be the reflection of any sentiment of the sufferer. The compassion of the spectator must arise altogether from the consideration of what he himself would feel, if he was reduced to the same unhappy situation; and what perhaps is impossible, was at the same time able to regard it with his present reason and judgment." Nothing can be more beautiful than this-but is it true to nature? Is the emotion, on witnessing so sad a spectacle, really awakened by the consideration of what we should feel, were we so miserably reduced? We do not fear to answer, No. Indeed there is something not very comprehensible in the idea of a man feeling compassion for another in affliction, the very nature of which affliction is seen to render the sufferer insensible of it-and yet at the same time to maintain that he feels the compassion on account of what he himself would suffer, if reduced to a state insensible of suffering. Smith is therefore obliged to suppose that the spectator not only imagines himself for the moment afflicted with insanity, like that of the object whom he commiserates, but that in that state he retains his present sense of its miseries. It seems to us that, in such a case as this, all that can with truth be said is, that we feel the possession of reason-and are therefore sensible of the magnitude of the loss--and secondly-which is the thought that chiefly fills our soulsthat we are awed at the humiliation or destruction of that great distinctive attribute of our kind, reasonand feel, in the sad sight before our eyes, human nature reduced beneath its own level to that of the mere sentient creation. The reference is not made directly to ourselves-at least, if there is any such reference, it is only an accessory and subordinate feeling-we think on man, capable of exaltation to an almost angelic intelligence of humiliation low as that of the beasts that perish. To understand the character of our sympathy, then, it is necessary for us to remember what has been this our human life. From the faint dawn of intelligence and love, we have known and felt ourselves as part of one great nature. All our thoughts, feelings, passions, joys, and sorrows, have been the same as those of our brethren of mankind. We recognise all these, not merely as our own-though it is by self-experience that we know their workings-but as belonging to humanity. We are not so separated by our own individual existence, by our own peculiar character, by our own joints, thews, and limbs— from other sentient and intelligent beings, as to require a constant reference to our self, in order to feel for their selves. There is no need for any operation or process of transferring thought for this purpose. We are all one Being in different forms and modifications and our souls, minds, hearts, and bodies are all possessed with the same common spirit. Thus, when we see joy, or grief, or any passion, we know and feel it to be human, and as much a part of our nature as if it were felt at the time by ourselves. We grow from infancy to manhood in love as well as thought—and we can no more cut off our loving self than our thinking self from the great common spiritual frame of humanity. When we lend our own passions, as we so often do to the inanimate creation-and borrow from it into our souls its seem ing gloom or gladness, we go beyond ourselves there, by the power of imagination widening the range of love. But all that we feel for that humanity in which we live, is felt because we do necessarily possess one common soul, and must obey those yearning and passionate emotions which are excited by the universal and immutable law of kind. Such is that feeling which we express when we speak of men as our fellow-creatures. The mere fact that we are all partakers of the same nature, and of the same condition, is felt and acknowledged by us all as a bond of affection and union. That we have the same moral soul, the same intelligence, the same affections, even the same living frame, constitutes the bond of fellowship among human kind. He who feels his heart revolt at some crime perpetrated here, knows that there is the same revolting at the same time among all the race. He who honours his parents, or speaks blessings on his child, knows that the same honour is felt among nations whose name he knows not, and the same blessings spoken in tongues he does not comprehend. What is this but the most comprehensive sympathy, obscurely felt only because it is not made known to us partially, and in moments, but is felt in all moments, and pervades our whole being.-Yet we may be aware what the nature of this sympathy is, and what is its power in uniting all men as brethren, when the consciousness of it is brought home to our minds by some slight incident; when we are touched with the intimations of the same nature with our own, brought unexpectedly to our apprehension; as when we are told of a tribe in the heart of Africa, that he who has sworn by the soul of his mother, is sure to keep his oath; and among the same people, of a mother, who, when the dead body of her son was brought into the village, who had been killed in a fight, in her passionate exclamations over him, had this still uppermost in her cries, that he had never told her a lie. Or when we hear from Ledyard that in all his wandering over the earth, among unknown and savage nations, the wildest and fiercest tribes, he never asked kindness or succour, in the language of courtesy, from woman, and was refused. In these little instances, when they occur, we feel at once, that those are our kind; that their spirits are framed like ours, and when we feel this, we feel love rise towards them at the same moment. To pursue this consideration further, even into its exceptions, we may observe, that when we read of those nations who, by their cruel and ferocious manners, are totally divided from us, and calmly or gladly act deeds which we abhor, we feel at the moment abhorrence towards themselves-this sympathy or fellow-feeling of nature is broken off-we regard them as monsters, not as men-we hate them because they have not hearts and spirits like ourselves-we almost question at the moment, whether they are of the same kind: and hence it is probable, notwithstanding our general acknowledgement of a general sympathy with the human race, that every one who has much acquainted himself with the character of different nations, finds towards some of them in particular, a fixed aversion and abhorrence, remaining from such strong impressions. Nor can that natural impression be removed, till we come at last, by different reflections upon human kind, to bring back our sympathy with them, which we are led to do at last, when we come to meditate seriously upon human nature, and to substitute the result of our calm and serious meditation for those passionate impressions which at first possess our minds. We then deliberately reflect that, however human nature may be divided from our affection by the deformity it sometimes puts on, yet that the soul was the same, and there thus arises what may be called even an awful sympathy of our spirits which have been more favoured in their unfolding, and have remained truer to their nature, with the original constitution of those, which having been less favoured, are fallen from their proper estate. Out of such a sympathy, and |