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As lightly as a graceful bird would o'er the ocean dip,
He steals on tiptoe forward, with his finger on his lip ;
Ah! needless is the caution, for an army rushing in

Would scarcely have its trampling heard above that deafening din.

Oh! the roar of that stupendous forge was louder than the blast
That rendeth down the forest trees, as it sweeps all conquering past :
Oh! the clangour of the hammers at every ponderous stroke,
Was heavier than the thundering fall of some primeval oak.
Only the mighty walls around unshaken; could sustain
The echo of that mingled sound, and fling it back again;
Only in Ætna's ancient caves such uproar could ascend,
Nor out into the upper air a sudden pathway rend.

And yet in measured time each stroke fell on the heated bar,
And thus, like giant music, broke upon the ear afar ;
And every glittering shower of sparks the hammers brought to life
Showed how the walls were hung with arms, for safety or for strife,
And lighted up each grimy brow, and the fiery eye that shone
Beneath it; for each sinewy smith was furnished but with one,
But that was like the flashing star, whose fierce incessant glare
Shines all the night supremely bright, when summer fills the air.

And now, amidst those workmen grim, the venturous pilgrim stands,
Unseen, 'till his soft fingers press his father's sturdy hands;
The uplifted hammers fall not-the sounding blows are hushed,
Only the forge-blast rushes on, as ever it hath rushed;
Each eye on the intruder turns, unknown to all save one,
And he, half proud, half angry, turns in wonder to his son;
Then in a voice, where father-love subdued the tone severe,

"How now," he cries, "pert urchin ?-my child, what brings thee here?"

"Borne on the breath of whispering winds, and of the murmuring waves, "I heard a tale of treasures kept within my father's caves: "I heard of shields of matchless proof, like that to Pluto given, "I heard of javelins, by whose power rocks are asunder riven; "I heard of sceptres powerful as that vast trident wrought "For Neptune on his ocean-throne; and here I have been taught, "Oh! my dread father, that ye forge the thunderbolts of Jove: "I want to prove against them all a weapon framed by Love."

In mute astonishment all gazed on the intruder bold,
But from his quiver forth he drew a slender dart of gold;
And while a half-contemptuous laugh around was heard to ring,
He took his bow, and fitted it, still smiling, to the string;
And while they wondered much to see his fearlessness of proof,
He aimed it at a polished shield suspended from the roof;
Far flew the glittering fragments!-aghast the master stands,

And the wily marksman danced for glee, and clapped his dimpled hands.

So shattered he the sceptre-so shattered he the spear,
And cleft the very thunderbolts, 'till the gazers thrilled with fear;
Then spake again his sire-" My boy, no farther need we prove

"That never armour may be forged invincible to Love.

"Go tell thy beauteous mother of the conquests of thy dart, "And pray that she will heal its wounds, once planted in my heart; "For well thou know'st I left the world her beauty doth adorn, "To shun the sting of darts like these, barbed by her ruthless scorn!" VOL. XXV.-No. 145.

F

CAMILLA.

No silken slave of luxury-no pampered child of pride-
And yet unto a royal house the maiden is allied;

No pettish airs-no regal frowns disturb her brow serene,
And yet the nursling of the woods is destined for a queen.
In forest haunts with merry nymphs and hardy hunters shared,
On simple food, in simple ways, was fair Camilla reared;
'Neath canopies of stately trees surpassing kingly halls-
Lulled by the music of the breeze, and birds, and waterfalls.

Tall was her graceful form-her limbs were cast in beauty's mould,
And lustrous were her azure eyes-her hair of sunny gold;
And as in beauty, so in speed to none Camilla yields,

For never foot as light as her's flew o'er the flowery fields.

The heavy ears of ripening wheat, as o'er she passed elate,

Bent not so much beneath her feet as by their own rich weight;

The waters, as o'er lake and stream she skimmed with graceful bound,
Scarce rose above her sandals to the instep's arching round.

Even as the bee and butterfly perch lightly on the bough,
So lightly fell her little foot upon the flowers below;
As scarcely ruffling ocean's breast, the sea-bird glances by
So o'er the glassy waters did the maiden's footstep fly;
To Dian's service in her youth a dedicated child,

Ah, had she ever thus been left to flourish in the wild,
In harmless warfare had she ranged the forest far and wide,
And victor but in sylvan sports, had happy lived and died.

But she is decked in royal robes, and throned, and honoured now,
Though heavily sometimes she feels the circlet press her brow;
And she must lead to hostile realms an armed and dauntless band,
And woe for those who chance to come near her own conquering brand!
Alas that death so suddenly hath crushed that fearless heart!
That Aruns there should find a mark for his ignoble dart!
But Dian loves her votary still, although so long estranged,
And by the huntress goddess is the fallen queen avenged!

HYMN TO MORS.†

Daughter of endless Night!
Mysterious offspring of mysterious shade,
Who meet'st not mortal sight

In any imaged form of flesh arrayed;

We build a temple here,

But in what shape shall we thy power enshrine?

What image shall we rear,

That our bowed hearts may venerate as thine?

Queen of the Volsci, and celebrated for the speed and lightness of her foot. She was reared in the woods, and dedicated to Diana, but afterwards ascended the throne, and, after engaging in several successful battles, was slain by a soldier named Aruns who, in revenge, was killed by Diana.

†The ancient goddess of death.

Through every day and hour

Thine acts are manifest-thy work is done;
Earth thrills beneath thy power,

Alike 'midst winter storm or summer sun.
Still is thy message sent-

Still from thy viewless hand shoots many a dart;
Nor hath thy mother lent

One of her stars to show us what thou art.

The goddess of the dawn

Sheds her bright smile upon the eastern hills,
Whilst on the grassy lawn

The wakeful shepherds watch by peaceful rills.
The goddess of the flowers

Leaves her soft breath upon the balmy wind,
Or, from the rosy bowers,

Looks laughing forth upon the busy hind.

The huntress goddess flies

With buskined feet along the mountain's breast,
Startling the heavy eyes

Of the tired hunter from his midnight rest.
But thou, who dost possess

A power more dread, more universal sway,
All vague and bodiless,

Hauntest all living things by night and day.

We look for thee in vain,

In the dim twilight, where all shadows rise,
Upon the spacious plain,

Or darkly hovering between earth and skies;
Or 'midst the leafy shades

Of the thick forests when the moon is low;
But whilst thy rule pervades

All things, thy deeds are all of thee we know.

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LITERARY censors have long taken a
distempered pleasure in trying to ter-
rify our intellectual youth from the
pursuit of poetry. Not the most hap-
less children of the wretched, say
they-

"Not beggar's brat, on bulk begot,
Nor offspring of a pedlar Scot,
Nor boys brought up to cleaning shoes,
The spawn of bridewell, or the stews,-
Are so disqualified by fate,

To rise in church, or law, or state,
As he, whom Phoebus, in his ire,
Hath blasted with poetic fire."

And, among the multitude of examples for ever in their mouths, of penury pursuing the footsteps, and disappointment corroding the minds of men of poetic genius, there is no name oftener dragged up, with all its want, dreadful accompaniments of drunkenness, and self-torture, than that of Robert Burns.

Swift, whose bitter words we have quoted, had really no belief in what he wrote, beyond that sort of scornful credit which a witty man will give to the grotesque creations of his own humour. He knew, as well as any man, the privileges and rewards of the poet; but there are conventional subjects of affected bitterness among there are of the satirists, just as

affected admiration among the panegy-
rists; and the lot of the poet has been
a theme for forced pity ever since the
appetite for scurrility raised satire to
a permanent place in literature. Swift's
lines, of course, have no reference to
Burns, who, probably, was not born
at the time of their composition; but
they carry on their front the mark of
that contempt and hatred for Scotland
and the Scottish people, which, just
before the generation of Burns, flowed
in a torrent of obloquy from so many
of the ablest pens of the age-and out
of which, under God, it was Robert
Burns' sincere and generous eloquence,
speaking in melodious strains of love,
and hope, and courage, that first raised
his drooping country, and in the proud
position which she has ever since
maintained, still crowns her with the

freshest, and perhaps the most enduring, of all the intellectual wreaths yet won for her by her children.

Men, much too readily, adopt as maxims the sententious epigrams of wit; and where "Scot," for a whole century, had been made the rhyme and catch-word of every thing that was tersely sarcastic, pungent, and ridiculous, as well as of much that was admirably provocative of contempt and dislike it speaks more wonderfully than perhaps any other instance of the power of song, since fabulous times, that, mainly through the instrumentality of that literary genius evoked by Burns, a single half-century should have seen such feelings totally dispelled, and their places occupied by a sincere esteem and generous admiration. We who, in Ireland, occasionally smart under the petulance of our small metropolitan wits, so powerless in comparison with the satirists of the reigns of Anne and the First and Second Georges, ought to draw a lesson of patience and courageous hope from the example. Our Poet has not yet arisen. Many eyes, and many eager, affectionate hearts were once turned to Moore, in the hope that, at last, the hour had come, and the man; but taste sickened, and freedom dropt a tear, when we saw the ingenuous muse of the Melodies apprentice himself to the vile arts of a lying and spiteful theology. The noble utterance was stopped, and the national hope crushed back to its sources. But let us sing "Craigstown's growing," and cherish our hope in the language of our encouragers :—

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soul, in allaying the splenetic heats of faction, and even in composing the bitter objurgations of theology. Where almost an angel from heaven would be disregarded in the obloquy and clamour of party or sectarian warfare, if a true poet arise, and speak according to his mission, he will undoubtedly be heard-even, as in old times, the bard could put an end to the battles of the Gauls, by shaking his chain of silence between the hosts. That such a man will some day arise among us, as Burns, sixty years since, arose among the Scotch-or as Beranger, in our own generation, has arisen among the Parisians-it is as reasonable, as it is consolatory and cheering, to expect; for, perhaps, no where in the world have so great a multitude of men, at any one time, been set thinking and striving to express great thoughts, as among ourselves, during the very year in which we write; and of the various manifestations of poetic genius with which the past exciting period has been rife, those to which alone the public admiration has fully responded, have been such as expressed generous and noble sentiments; while any pieces affecting the satirical and denunciatory vein so much in vogue a century ago, have met with no commendation beyond the suspicious applauses of the devotees. In London, on the contrary, a frivolous and illconditioned sort of badinage has sprung into popularity, hardly energetic enough to be deemed satire, yet, too petulant to pass for raillery-a sure sign of decaying taste, and of an unhealthy morality.

The Scotch, for much of the severity which they experienced at the hands of the wits of Queen Anne's and the two succeeding reigns, had mainly to thank the offensive extravagancies of their clergy. The "Tale of a Tub" was written, as much for the ridicule of Jack, as for the censure of Peter; and had it not been for the arrogant pretensions of the Presbyterians in the latter parliaments of Anne, we, probably, would never have heard of the loaf forced down Martin's throat, in lieu of a shoulder of mutton-or of the supernumerary tags to my Lord Peter's small-clothes. In

the history of John Bull, the same feeling breaks out in the derogatory character of Peg, and in Jack's antics,

insanity, and suicide-while throughout his verse satires, Swift never misses an opportunity of avenging his polemical quarrel on the beggarliness, the dirtiness, and the selfishness of the Scotch people.

Johnson, a man of too candid a magnanimity to exaggerate in any thing, did not affect to conceal, speaking of their pretensions to learning, an opinion, perhaps more damaging, in consequence of its measured impartiality, than the severest sarcasms of those who denied the obnoxious race all credit for either civility or knowledge. Men bred there," says he, speaking of their universities, "cannot be expected to be often decorated with the splendours of ornamental erudition; but they obtain a mediocrity of knowledge, between learning and ignorance, not inadequate to the purposes of common life, which is very widely diffused among them, and which, countenanced in general by a combination so invidious that their friends cannot defend it, and actuated in particulars by a spirit of enterprise so vigorous that their enemies are constrained to praise it, enables them to find, or make their way to employment, riches, and distinction."

Wilkes's hostility to the administration of Lord Bute, not only revived in the pages of the anomalously-named North Briton, the old libels of the time of Elizabeth, but let loose on the devoted countrymen of the Tory premier the whole ferocious energy of Churchill, whose mind had so thoroughly contracted the habits of the bully, that he never assails an enemy of his own with half the fury that possesses him when espousing the personal or political quarrels of his friend. Nothing but the exhaustion of a desolating war could have kept the Scotch quiet, under the sting of Churchill's Prophecy of Famine: nothing but the utmost brutality could have dictated so cruel a libel. Yet, the introductory part of it is little worse than some of Swift's satirical pictures of the coarseness and brutishness of his own poor countrymen. May the conclusion yet be as applicable to us, as heaven, changing the words of the mocker into unexpected reality, has actually made it to those whose poverty and feebleness it was designed to aggravate!

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