Then for the style, majestic and divine,
It speaks no less than God in every line:
Commanding words, whose force is still the same
As the first fiat that produced our frame.
All faiths beside, or did by arms ascend,
Or sense indulged has made mankind their friend:
This only doctrine does our lusts oppose:
Unfed by Nature's soil, in which it grows;
Cross to our interests, curbing sense and sin;
Oppress'd without, and undermined within,-
It thrives through pain; its own tormentors tires;
And with a stubborn patience still aspires.
To what can reason such effects assign
Transcending nature, but to laws divine,
Which in that sacred volume are contain❜d;
Sufficient, clear, and for that use ordain'd?

DRYDEN.1

INDIVIDUAL DEPENDENT ON GENERAL HAPPINESS.

Man, like the generous vine, supported lives:
The strength he gains is from th' embrace he gives.
On their own axis as the planets run,

Yet make at once their circle round the sun;

So two consistent motions act the soul;

And one regards itself, and one the whole.

Thus God and Nature link'd the general frame,

And bade self-love and social be the same.

THE TRUE CHARACTER OF A POET.

Not Fortune's worshipper, nor Fashion's fool,
Not Lucre's madman, nor Ambition's tool,

1 John Dryden (1631-1700) may be termed the founder of the modern English style in prose and verse. He was born in Northamptonshire, and devoted his life to literature in London. Renouncing the Puritan party at the Restoration of Charles II., he attached himself to the Court taste in poetry and the drama, and served with his poetic pen the political and ecclesiastical objects of Charles II. and James II. On the ascent of the latter prince to the throne, Dryden, from motives either of conviction or interest, announced himself a Roman Catholic. He died in embarrassment and distress. His later style is terse and energetic; his arrows of satire are, in the words of Sir Walter Scott, always drawn to the head. The poetical style of Dryden was perpetuated in the eighteenth century by Pope and his followers in more smooth and elegant, but less nervous and vigorous features. Gray has finely alluded to the characteristics of Dryden's style in describing his "car" as drawn by

"Two coursers of ethereal race,

With necks in thunder clothed, and long resounding pace." Our extract is taken from the "Religio Laici," written before his conversion to Popery.

Not proud nor servile; be one poet's praise,
That, if he pleased, he pleased by manly ways:
That flattery, ev'n to kings, he held a shame,
And thought a lie in verse or prose the same;
That not in fancy's maze he wander'd long,
But stoop'd to Truth, and moralized his song:
That not for fame, but Virtue's better end,
He stood the furious foe, the timid friend,
The damning critic, half-approving wit,
The coxcomb hit, or fearing to be hit;
Laugh'd at the loss of friends he never had,
The dull, the proud, the wicked, and the mad ;
The distant threats of vengeance on his head,
The blow unfelt, the tear he never shed;
The tale revived, the lie so oft o'erthrown,
Th' imputed trash, and dulness not his own;
The morals blacken'd when the writings 'scape,
The libell'd person and the pictur'd shape;
Abuse on all he loved, or loved him, spread,
A friend in exile, or a father dead;
The whisper, that, to greatness still too near,1
Perhaps, yet vibrates on his sovereign's ear,-
Welcome for thee, fair Virtue! all the past:
For thee, fair Virtue! welcome ev❜n the last!
POPE.2

NOSE AND EYES.

Between Nose and Eyes a strange contest arose,-
The spectacles set them unhappily wrong;
The point in dispute was, as all the world knows,
To which the said spectacles ought to belong.

So Tongue was the lawyer, and argued the cause,
With a great deal of skill and a wig full of learning;
While Chief Baron Ear sat to balance the laws,

So famed for his talent in nicely discerning.

1 Pope had been attacked by his enemies in all these ways.

2 Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was the son of a London merchant, a Roman Catholic. He adopted Dryden as his model. His poetry has been termed that of artificial life; he abounds in extensive, though not in profound or exact learning. The elegance of his style, and the musical cadence of his verse, rendered him the head of a school of writing in the eighteenth century which, in fifty or sixty years, degenerated into inane tameness, and was effaced by the vigorous products of our recent literature, which may be said to have commenced with the writings of Cowper, Crabbe, and Burns. Our first extract is from his celebrated "Essay on Man." The second from his "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot."

"In behalf of the Nose, it will quickly appear,

And your lordship," said Tongue, "will undoubtedly find
That the Nose has had spectacles always in wear,
Which amounts to possession, time out of mind."

Then holding the spectacles up to the court-
"Your lordship observes they are made with a straddle,
As wide as the ridge of the nose is,--in short,

Designed to sit close to it, just like a saddle.

66

Again, would your lordship a moment suppose
('Tis a case that has happened and may be again)
That the visage or countenance had not a nose,
Pray who would, or who could, wear spectacles then?
"On the whole it appears, and my argument shews,
With a reasoning the court will never condemn,
That the spectacles plainly were made for the Nose,
And the Nose was as plainly intended for them.”

Then shifting his side, as a lawyer knows how,
He pleaded again in behalf of the Eyes;
But what were his arguments few people know,
For the court did not think they were equally wise.

So his lordship decreed, in a grave solemn tone,
Decisive and clear, without one if or but-
That whenever the Nose put his spectacles on,
By day-light or candle-light-Eyes should be shut.

COWPER.1

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;

Of a

1 William Cowper (1731-1800) was born at Berkhampstead, in Hertfordshire. naturally feeble bodily constitution, and of a timid excitable nervous temperament, his mind becaine gradually disordered, till it was obscured by intervals of years of imbecile melancholy. The poet found kind friends and protectors in the Unwin family, with whom he spent the later years of his life at Olney, in Buckinghamshire. Cowper's vigorous, natural, and living-spirited poetry, overthrew the degenerate artificial school founded by Pope. His works are chiefly moral and didactic, interspersed with beautiful descriptions of nature, and overflowing with pure and ardent sentiments of universal love and Christian piety. The lines we have selected present a specimen of that innocent and naïve humour of which his mind was capable even in the darkest periods of his disease We regret our inability to insert examples of Cowper's higher poetry.

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 unroll'd.

But midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men,

To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess,

And roam along, the world's tired denizen,

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 flatter'd, follow'd, sought, and sued ;
This is to be alone; this, this is solitude!

GREECE.

Fair clime! where every season smiles
Benignant o'er those blessed isles,
Which seen from far Colonna's height,
Make glad the heart that hails the sight,
And lend to loneliness delight.

There mildly dimpling, Ocean's cheek
Reflects the tints of many a peak
Caught by the laughing tides that lave
These Edens of the eastern wave:
And if at times a transient breeze
Break the blue crystal of the seas,
Or sweep one blossom from the trees,
How welcome is each gentle air

That wakes and wafts the odours there!

THE WILD GAZELLE-A HEBREW MELODY.

The wild gazelle on Judah's hills
Exulting yet may bound,
And drink from all the living rills
That gush on holy ground;

Its airy step and glorious eye

May glance in tameless transport by :

A step as fleet, an eye more bright
Hath Judah witness'd there;
And o'er her scenes of lost delight
Inhabitants more fair.

The cedars wave on Lebanon,

But Judah's statelier maids are gone!

More blest each palm that shades those plains
Than Israel's scatter'd race;

For, taking root, it there remains

In solitary grace:

It cannot quit its place of birth,

It will not live in other earth.

But we must wander witheringly,
In other lands to die;

And where our fathers' ashes be,
Our own may never lie:

Our temple hath not left a stone,

And Mockery sits on Salem's throne.

BYRON.1

SINKING OF THE POLAR STAR.

A star has left the kindling sky-
A lovely northern light;
How many planets are on high,
But that has left the night!

I miss its bright familiar face;
It was a friend to me,
Associate with my native place,
And those beyond the sea.

It rose upon our English sky,
Shone o'er our English land,

And brought back many a loving eye,
And many a gentle hand.

1 George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron, (1788-1824) was perhaps the most eminent in reputation among modern poets. A youth of wasteful and profligate pleasure had embarrassed his fortune and tainted his mind; an ill-assorted marriage completed his causes of unhappiness. He exiled himself from England, and after a roving useless life in various parts of Europe, he generously devoted himself to the cause of the Greeks in their patriotic struggle with the Turks. He had just commenced a career which might have in some degree atoned for the follies of his earlier years, when he died of fever in 1824 at Missolonghi, a village on the western coast of Greece. His poetry is characterized by fervid brilliancy of language and description; but is pervaded by a misanthropic spirit that mocks at all which the human heart is disposed to revere.