Miscellaneous Poems. PROSE IN RHYME: OR EPIGRAMS, MORALITIES, AND THINGS WITHOUT A NAME.

But springtide blossoms on thy lips,
And tears take sunshine from thine eyes !
Life is but thought : so think I will
That youth and I are house-mates still.

What outward form and feature are

He guesseth but in part;
But what within is good and fair

He seeth with the heart.

A DAY DREAM.
My eyes make pictures, when they are shut:-

I see a fountain, large and fair,
A willow and a ruin'd hut,

And thee, and mc, and Mary there.
O Mary! make thy gentle lap our pillow!
Bend o'er

us,
like a bower, my

beautiful

green willow!

LINES SUGGESTED BY THE LAST WORDS OF

BERENGARIUS.

OB, ANNO DOM. 1088.
No more 'twixt conscience staggering and the Pope,
Soon shall I now before

appear,
By him to be acquitted, as I hope;
By him to be condemned, as I fear.-

my God

REFLECTION ON THE ABOVE.

A wild-rose roofs the ruin'd shed,
And that and summer well agree :

Lynx amid moles! had I stood by thy bed,
And lo! where Mary leans her head,

Be of good cheer, mcek soul! I would have said : Two dear names carved upon the tree !

I see a hope spring from that humble fear. And Mary's tears, they are not tears of sorrow:

All are not strong alike through storms to steer Our sister and our friend will both be here lo-morrow.

Right onward. What though dread of threatend

death 'T was day! But now few, large, and bright, And dungeon torture made thy hand and breath The stars are round the crescent moon!

Inconstant to the truth within thy heart? And now it is a dark warm night,

That truth, from which, through fear, thou twice didst The balmiest of the month of June!

start, A glow-worm fallen, and on the marge remounting

Fear haply told thee, was a learned strife, Shines, and its shadow shines, fit stars for our sweet

Or not so vital as to claim thy life: fountain.

And myriads had reach'd Heaven, who never knew

Where lay the difference 'twixt the false and true! O ever-ever be thou blest! For dearly, Asra! love I thee!

Ye, who secure 'mid trophies not your own,
This brooding warmth across my breast,

Judge bim who won them when he stood alone,
This depth of tranquil bliss-ah me!

And proudly talk of recreant BERENGARE-
Fount, tree and shed are gone, I know not wlither,

O first the age, and then the man compare!

That But in one quiet room we three are still together.

how dark! congenial minds how rare!

No host of friends with kindred zeal did burn !
The shadows dance upon the wall,

No throbbing hearts awaited his return!
By the still dancing fire-flames made;

Prostrate alike when prince and peasant fell,
And now they slumber, moveless all!

Ile only disenchanted from the spell,
And now they mell to one deep shade!

Like the weak worm that gems the starless night,
But not from me shall this mild darkness steal thee: Moved in the scanty circlet of his light:
I dream thee with mine eyes, and at my heart I feel And was it strange if he withdrew the ray
thee!

That did but guide the night-birds to their prey?
The ascending Day-star with

a bolder Thinc eyelash on my cheek doth play

eye 'T is Mary's hand upon my brow!

Hath lit each dew-drop on our trimmer lawn!
But let me check this tender lay,

Yet not for this, if wise, will we decry
Which none may hear but she and thon!

The spots and strucgles of the timid Dawn!
Like the still hive at quiet midnight humming,

Lest so we tempt th' approaching Noon to scorn Murmur it to yourselves, ye two beloved women!

The mists and painted vapours of our Morn.

age

He saw a LAWYER killing a Viper
On a dung-heap beside his stable,
And the Devil smiled, for it put him in mind
Of Cain and his brother, Abel.

A POTRECARY on a white horse

Rode by on his vocations,
And the Devil thought of his old Friend

Death in the Revelations.

Ilc saw a cottage with a double coach-house,

A cottage of gentility!
And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin

Is pride that apes humility.

CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL OBJECT.
Since all, that beat about in Nature's range,
Or veer or vanish, why shouldst thou remain
The only constant in a world of change-
O yearning THOUGBT, that livest but in the brain?
Call to the HOURS, that in the distance play,
The faery people of the future day--
Fond Thougar! not one of all that shining swarm
Will breathe on thee with life-enkindling breath,
Till when, like strangers shelt'ring from a storm,
Hope and Despair meet in the porch of Death!
Yet still thou haunt'st me; and though well I see,
She is not thou, and only thou art she,
Still, still as though some dear embodied good,
Some living love before my eyes there stood,
With answering look a ready ear to lend,
I mourn to thee and say—. Ah! loveliest friend!
That this the meed of all my toils might be,
To have a home, an English home and thee!
Vain repetition! Home and thou are one.
The peacefull'st cot the moon shall shine upon,
Lulld by the thrush and waken'd by the lark,
Without thee were but a becalmed Bark,
Whose helmsman on an ocean waste and wide
Sits mute and pale his mouldering helm beside.

He went into a rich bookseller's shop,

Quoth he! we are both of one college ; For I myself sate like a cormorant once

Fast by the tree of knowledge.' .

Down the river there plied with wind and tide,

Apig, with vast celerity;
And the Devil look'd wise as be saw how the while,
Ji cut its own throat. There! quoth he, with a smile,

Goes « England's commercial prosperity.»

As he went through Cold-Bath Fields he saw.

A solitary cell,
And the Devil was pleased, for it gave him a hint

For improving his prisons in Hell.

And art thou pothing? Such thou art, as when
The woodman, winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, where o'er the sheep-track's maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glise’ning baze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image' with a glory round its head;
The enamour'd rustic worships its fair hues,
Nor knows, he makes the shadow he pursues!

General

burning face
He saw with consternation,
And back to hell his way did he take,
For the Devil thought, by a slight mistake,

It was general conflagration.

1 And all amid them stood the TREE OF LIFE
High eminent, blooming ambrosial fruit
Of vegetable gold (query paper money?); and next to Life
Our Death, the TREE OF KNOWLEDGE, grew fast by.--

THE SUICIDE'S ARGUMENT.
Ere the birth of my life, if I wish'd it or no
No question was ask'd me-it could not be so !
If the life was the question, a thing sent to try,
And to live on be Yes; what can No be? to die.

NATURE'S ANSWER.

Is 't return'd as 't was sent? Is 't no worse for the wear? So clomb this first grand ibief

Think first, what you are! Call to mind what Thence up be few, and on the tree of life

you WERE! Sat like a cormorant,- PAR. Lost, IV.

I gave you innocence, I gave you hope,

Gave health, and genius, and an ample scope. The allegory here is so apt, that in a catalogue of various readings obtained from collating the MSS. one might expect to tind

Return you me guilt, lethargy, despair? ir noted, thai for LIFE» Cod. quid habent, « Trade."

Make out the Invent'ry; inspect, compare!

Though indeed THE TRADE, i. e. the bibliopolic, so called xúca zorov, Then die-if die you dare! may be regarded as Lipe sensu eminentiori ; a suggestion, which I owe to a young retailer in the hosiery line, who on hearing a description of the net profits, dinner parties, country houses, etc. been mistaken, and most certainly he did not hear any dames men. of the tradu, exclaimed, Ay! that's what I call Lire now !-- tioned. In simple verily, the Author never meant any one, or inThis - Life, our Death - is thus happily contrasted with the fruits deed any thing but to put a concluding stanza to bis doggerel. of Auiborship.-Sic nos non nobis mellificamus Apes.

' This phenomenon, wbich the Author has bimself ex rienced, or this poem, with which the Fire, Famine and Slaughter first and of which the reader may find a description in one of the earlier appeared in the Morning Post, the three first stan as, which are volumes of the Manchester Philosophical Transactions, is applied worih all the rest, and the ninth, were dictated by Mr Southey. figuratively in the following passage of the Aids to Reflection : Between the ninth and the concluding stanza, two or three are • Pindar's fine remark respecting the different effecis of music, omilled as grounded on subjects that have lost their interest--and on different characters, bolds equally true of Geoias: as many as for better reasons.

are not delighted by it are disturbed, perplesed, irritated. The If any one sbould ask, who General - mcant, the Author begs beholder either recognizes it as a projecied form of his vun Being. leare to inform him, that he did once see a red-faced person in a that moves before him with a Glory round its head, or recoils from is dream whom by the dress he took for a General; but he might bare as a spectre.r-Aids to Reflection, p. 220.

Or call my destiny niggard ! O no! no!,
THE BLOSSOMING OF THE SOLITARY DATE- | It is her largeness, and her overflow,
TREE.

Which being incomplete, disquieteth me so!
A LAMENT.

4.

For never touch of gladness stirs my heart, I SEEX to have an indistinct recollection of baving read either in one of the ponderous tomes of George of Venico, or in some other com

But tim'rously beginning to rejoice pilation from the uninspired Hebrew Writers, an Apologue or Rab- Like a blind Arab, that from sleep doth start binical Tradition to ibe following purpose : While our first parents stood before their offended Maker, and the Beloved ! 't is not thine; thou art not there!

In lonesome tent, I listen for thy voice. last words of the sentence were yet sounding in Adam's ear, the guileful false serpent, a counterfeit and a usurper from the begin- Then melts the bubble into idle air, ning, presumptuously took on himself tbe character of advocate or And wishing without hope I restlessly despair. mediator, and pretending to intercede for Adam, exclaimed : « Nay, Lord, in thy justice, not so! for the Man was the least in fault.

5. Rauber let the Woman return at once to the dust, and let Adam re

The mother with anticipated glee main in this ihy Paradise.. And the word of the Most High answered Satan : • The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. Smiles o'er the child, that standing by her chair,! Treacherous Friend ! if with guilt like thine, it had been possible and flatt'ning its round cheek upon her knce, for thee to have the heart of a Man, and to feel ibu yearning of a

Looks up, and doth its rosy lips prepare human soul for its counterpart, the sentence, which thou DOW counsellest, should have been inflicted on thyself.»

To mock the coming sounds. At that sweet sight

She hears her own voice with a new delight; [The title of the following poem was suggested by a faet mentioned

And if the babe perchance should lisp the notes aright, by Linnæus, of a Date-tree in a pobleman's garden, which year after year bad put forth a fall show of blossoms, but never pro

6. duced froit, till a branch from a Date-tree had been conveyed Then is she tenfold gladder than before! from a distance of some bundred leagues. The first leaf of the MS. from wbich the poem has been transcribed, and which con

But should disease or chance the darling take, tained the two or three introducory stanzas, is wanting: and What then avail thosc songs, which sweet of yorė the author has in vain laxed bis memory to repair the loss. But Were only sweet for their sweet echo's sake? a rode drauyht of the poem contains the substance of ibo stanzas,

Dear maid! no prautler at a mother's knee and the reader is requested to receive it as the substitute. It is not impossible, that some congenial spirit, whose years do not

Was e'er so dearly prized as I prize thee : exceed ibose of the author, at ibe time the poem was written, may Why was I made for love, and love denied to me? find a pleasure in restoring the Lament to its original integrity by a reduction of the thoughts to the requisite Metre.-S.T.C.

FANCY IN NUBIBUS,

1.

presence of

2.

OR THE POET IN THE CLOUDS. Beneath the blaze of a tropical sun the mountain peaks are the Thrones of Frost, through the absence of O! it is pleasant, with a heart at ease, objects to reflect the rays. « What no one with us shares,

Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies,

To make the sluifting clouds be what you please, seems scarce our own. The

a ONE,

Or let the easily persuaded eyes
The best beloved, who ioverb me the best,

Own each quaint likeness issuing from the mould is for the heart, what the supporting air from within is Of a friend's fancy; or with head bent low for the hollow globe with its suspended car. Deprive it And cheek aslanı, see rivers tlow of gold of this, and all without, that would have buoyed it aloft 'Twixt crimson banks; and then, a traveller, go. cven to the seat of the gods, becomes a burthen, and From mount to mount through CLOUDLAND, gorgeous crushes it into flatness.

land!
Or list'ning to the tide, with closed sight,

Be that blind bard, who on the Chian strand The finer the sense for the beautiful and the lovely, By those deep sounds possess'd, with inward light and the fairer and lovelier the object presented to the Beheld the lurad and the ODYSSEY sense; the more exquisite the individual's capacity of Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea. joy, and the more ample his means and opportunities of enjoyment, the more heavily will he feel the ache of solitariness, the more unsubstantial becomes the feast

THE TWO FOUNTS. spread around him. . What matters it, whether in fact the viands and the ministering graces are shadowy or

STANZAS ADDRESSED TO A LADY ON HER RECOVERY real, to him who has not hand to grasp nor arms to em

WITH UNBLEMISHED LOOKS, FROM A SEVERE ATTACK brace them?

OF PAIN.

"T was my last waking thought, how it could be, 3.

That thou, sweet friend, such angnish shouldst endure : Imagination; bonourable Aims;

When straighi from Dreamland came a Dwarf, and he Free Commune with the choir that cannot die; Could tell the cause, forsooth, aud knew the cure. Science and Sony; Delight in liule things, The buoyant child surviving in the man;

Methought he fronted me, with peering look Fields, forests, ancient mountains, ocean, sky, Fix'd on my beart; and read aloud in game With all iheir voices~0 dere I accuse

The loves and gricís therein, as from a book : Bly earthly lot as guilty of my spleen,

And utter'd praise like one who wishi'd to blame.