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BIRON.

INSCRIPTION ON THE MONUMENT OF A DOG.

WHEN some proud son of man returns to earth,
Unknown to glory, but upheld by birth,
The sculptor's art exhausts the pomp of woe,
And storied urns record who rests below;
When all is done, upon the tomb is seen,
Not what he was, but what he should have been :
But the poor dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his master's own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonour'd falls, unnoticed all his worth,
Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth :
While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,

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except cases where they are mixed up with published writings which influence, and are designed to influence, the universal mind. Many of the Poems of Lord Byron have a dangerous tendency: they are calculated to remove the hideous features of Vice, and present it, if not in a tempting, at least in a natural and pardonable light. Whether it was a genuine sentiment, or a gross affectation, it matters not; but it was the frequent boast of the Poet, that he scorned and hated human kind; and out of this feeling, or this pretension, grew his labours to corrupt it. It was not alone against THINGS held sacred by society, that his spleen and venom were directed: he strove to render odious some of the best and purest men that have ever lived; and his attacks were not the momentary ebullitions of dislike, but the produce of deep and settled hatred, the more bitter in proportion as the cause was small. To the various circumstances that are said to have warped his mind, we cannot here refer. We perform an imperative duty, in a work which must find its way among the young and enthusiastic, when we warn the reader of his exquisite poetry, that danger lurks under the leaves. The Poems of Byron will live, as he had a right to anticipate they would, " with his land's language." The amazing power he possessed of searching into and pourtraying character,-his prodigious skill in versification, his fine perception of the sublime and beautiful in nature,--his graceful and unforced wit, his deep readings of human passion, his accurate knowledge of the secret movements of the heart, -were so many keys to his wonderful and universal success.

* Of the many beautiful editions of Byron's works which Mr. Murray has published, the last, in one

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WHEN some proud son of man returns to earth,
Unknown to glory, but upheld by birth,
The sculptor's art exhausts the pomp of woe,
And storied urns record who rests below;
When all is done, upon the tomb is seen,
Not what he was, but what he should have been :
But the poor dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his master's own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonour'd falls, unnoticed all his worth,
Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth :
While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,

Oh, man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,
Debas'd by slavery, or corrupt by power,
Who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust,
Degraded mass of animated dust!

Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,
Thy smiles hypocrisy, thy words deceit!
By nature vile, ennobled but by name,
Each, kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.
Ye! who perchance behold this simple urn,

Pass on, it honours none you wish to mourn :
To mark a friend's remains these stones arise ;
I never knew but one, and here he lies.

THE DREAM.

Our life is twofold: sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence; sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,

And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy :
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off our waking toils,
They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity:
They pass like spirits of the past, they speak
Like sybils of the future; they have power-
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;

They make us what we were not-what they will,
And shake us with the vision that's gone by, —
The dread of vanish'd shadows. Are they so ?
Is not the past all shadow? What are they?
Creations of the mind? The mind can make
Substance, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.
I would recal a vision which I dream'd
Perchance in sleep,-for in itself a thought,
A slumbering thought, is capable of years,

I saw two beings in the hues of youth
Standing upon a hill, a gentle hill,
Green and of mild declivity, the last
As 'twere the cape of a long ridge of such,
Save that there was no sea to lave its base,
But a most living landscape, and the wave
Of woods and corn-fields, and the abodes of men
Scatter'd at intervals, and wreathing smoke
Arising from such rustic roofs; the hill
Was crown'd with a peculiar diadem
Of trees, in circular array, so fix'd,-
Not by the sport of nature, but of man :
These two, a maiden and a youth, were there
Gazing; the one, on all that was beneath-
Fair as herself-but the boy gazed on her :
And both were young, and one was beautiful;
And both were young, yet not alike in youth.
As the sweet moon on the horizon's verge,
The maid was on the eve of womanhood ;-
The boy had fewer summers, but his heart
Had far outgrown his years; and, to his eye,
There was but one beloved face on earth-
And that was shining on him: he had look'd
Upon it till it could not pass away;
He had no breath, no being, but in hers:
She was his voice;-he did not speak to her,
But trembled on her words: she was his sight,
For his eye follow'd hers, and saw with hers,
Which colour'd all his objects;-he had ceased
To live within himself: she was his life,-
The ocean to the river of his thoughts,
Which terminated all! upon a tone,

A touch of hers, his blood would ebb and flow,
And his cheek change tempestuously; - his heart
Unknowing of its cause of agony.

But she in these fond feelings had no share:
Her sighs were not for him! to her he was
Even as a brother, but no more: 'twas much,
For brotherless she was, save in the name
Her infant friendship had bestow'd on him;
Herself the solitary scion left

Of a time-honour'd race. It was a name

Which pleased him, and yet pleased him not, and why? Time taught him a deep answer-when she loved

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