nature, for those which are to be brought to us by the hand of sense, and consigned to the care of our adoption? The only poet of our time into whom the power of old Greece past like living fire, never left the smoke of London till he went away to die; Keats could have learnt nothing more by gazing on Athens, and bathing his feet in the Ægean; he would perhaps, however, have lost nothing, nor feared to lose, and this may be the privilege of the highest; they who have a little wealth, are pardoned if they pause and tremble, before they commit it to a possible hazard, and are somewhat blind to the probable advantage. Victor Hugo, a true poet, has resolved never to pass the Alps, and to preserve his own Italy inviolate; I am going to Greece because I love it, but for the same love of it, I am almost tempted to turn back. It is a happy philosophy, to believe that loss and gain, in equal proportions, are the contents and history of human life; but few, I imagine, can look steadily at this consolation in the crisis of the change, and cheerfully reckon upon the "other race" to be, and the "other palms" to be "won *."

* Vide Wordsworth's Platonic Ode.

THE IONIAN ISLANDS.

CORFOU.

THOU pleasant island, whose rich garden-shores

Have had a long-lived fame of loveliness*,
Recorded in the historic song, that framed

The unknown poet of an unknown time,
Illustrating his native Ithaca,

And all her bright society of isles,

Most pleasant land! To us, who journeying come
From the far west, and fall upon thy charms,

Our earliest welcome to Ionian seas,
Thou art a wonder and a deep delight,
Thy usual habitants can never know.
Thou art a portal, whence the Orient,
The long-desired, long-dreamt-of Orient,
Opens upon us, with its stranger forms,
Outlines immense and gleaming distances,
And all the circumstance of faery-land.
Not only with a present happiness,
But taking from anticipated joys

An added sense of actual bliss, we stand

Upon thy cliffs, or tread the slopes that leave
No interval of shingle, rock, or sand,
Between their verdure and the Ocean's brow,--
Whose olive-groves (unlike the darkling growth,
That earns on western shores the traveller's scorn)
Can wear the grey that on their foliage lies,
As but the natural hoar of lengthened days,-
Making, with their thick-bosst and fissured trunks,
Bases far-spread and branches serpentine,
Sylvan cathedrals, such as in old times
Gave the first life to Gothic art, and led
Imagination so sublime a way.

Then forth advancing, to our novice eyes
How beautiful appears the concourse clad
In that which, of all garbs, may best befit
The grace and dignity of manly form:
The bright red open vest, falling upon
The white thick-folded kirtle, and low cap

Above the high-shorn brow.

Nor less than these,

With earnest joy, and not injurious pride,

We recognise of Britain and her force

The wonted ensigns and far-known array;

And feel how now the everlasting sea,
Leaving his old and once imperious spouse,
To faint, in all the beauty of her tears,

On the dank footsteps of a mouldering throne,

Has taken to himself another mate,

Whom his uxorious passion has endowed,

Not only with her antient properties,

But with all other gifts and privilege,

Within the circle of his regal hand.

Now forward, -forward on a beaming path,
But be each step as fair as hope has feigned it,
For me, the memory of the little while,
That here I rested happily, within

The close-drawn pale of English sympathies,
Will bear the fruit of many an after-thought,
Bright in the dubious track of after-years.

"It is an isle under Ionian skies,

Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise."

SHELLEY.

Having lost all consciousness of the beauty of those scenes which have been tediously presented to them for years together, day after day, and considering the whole term of their residence there as a mere official banishment, it is little wonder that Englishmen, on their return home, are seldom inclined to expatiate on the picturesque merits of the Ionian islands. To a passing traveller Corfou can give the rare pleasures to which I have dedicated the above lines. The landskips are of unexceeded richness, and their general effect is very different from that of Italian scenery; to this the raised roofs of the towns and

villages contribute not a little. Descriptive sketches are generally uninteresting, except to those whom they can the least instruct, I mean those who have themselves seen what is attempted to be drawn; but if any scene can look well upon paper, that of the "One-Gun Battery," the daily ride, drive, and walk of Corfouots and English, might be fairly selected. It is, as seen on one side, a small green terrace, on the skirts of the thick olive grove through which it is approacht; on the other it is a platform on the top of as grand a cliff as ever beetled over a northern sea. The little peninsula on which it stands slants towards the east, so that the eye takes in the whole of the bay which is enclosed between St. Salvador and the citadel. The former stretches across the north, one level wall of majestic mountain, rising at each extremity as into a natural turret, while the tongue of land, on which the two-horned fortress raises its fantastic form, presents its crescent outline on the nearer side. The town (which, like most others in these latitudes, is far fitter to be painted than to be lived in) spreads from the citadel into the main land, and is backt by other fortifications, the suburb villages running along the shore on either hand. Beyond the strait, which is seldom not adorned by some considerable vessel passing at full sail in one or other direction, the Albanian hills lay their huge shadows over each other as the place of the sun may chance to be, mass folding over mass, and tier rising above tier, till the highest range faintly draws the line of the eastern horizon. To the north the heights of the continent seem to join on continuously with those of St. Salvador, closing round the sea as if it were a lake; but its southward course lies clear, uninterrupted by a single islet. It is very beautiful to linger in this quiet spot, and look at these things as the summer evening comes