human nature with as cold and cynical a disposition as we will, we cannot cheat ourselves into the belief of it. How a set of young men, with all the freshness of feeling, peculiar to their age and, coming almost universally direct from their homes, can be indifferent to the good-will or happiness of those with whom they may be thrown, is difficult enough to conceive; but to suppose them capable of acquiring in the course of three or four years the studied artificialness of manners, which the most finished men of the world find it difficult to make themselves masters of in a life-time, is more ridiculous than to believe in the existence of certain strange contortions of humanity with which some of the fashionable novelists of our day have endeavoured to gull us.

To me, there was ever a strange fascination in the bare conception I had formed of a College friend; and I confess that the more substantial creatures of flesh and blood, that have since supplanted it, have been by no means less pleasant than I had anticipated. Manhood will be upon me shortly with its ambitious schemes, its wearing toils, and its disappointed hopes; and old age with its chance retrospect of pain or pleasure may hap to overtake me; yet in every change of life the intercourse which I have had with my early friends will exert a mysterious and powerful influence on me. will have chilled many a feeling before it can touch with its cold hand those which are among my earliest and best; and memory will have lost half its power when it ceases to cherish the kind words and actions the chronicling of which has exercised it so largely.

Time

GEOFFREY LA-TOUCHE.

EVENING.

BY A TAILOR.

DAY hath put on his jacket—and around
His burning bosom buttoned it with stars.
Here will I lay me on the velvet moss,
That is like padding to earth's meagre ribs,
And hold communion with the things about me.
Ah me! how lovely is the golden braid,

That binds the skirt of night's descending robe !
The thin leaves, quivering on their silken threads,
Do make a music like to rustling satin,

As the light breezes smooth their downy nap.
Ha, what is this that rises to my touch,
So like a cushion? Can it be a cabbage?
It is, it is that deeply injured flower,

Which boys do flout us with-but yet I love thee,
Thou giant rose, wrapped in a green surtout.
Doubtless in Eden thou didst blush as bright
As these thy puny brethren; and thy breath
Sweetened the fragrance of her spicy air;
But now thou seemest like a bankrupt beau,
Stripped of his gaudy hues and essences,
And growing portly in his sober cloths.
Is that a swan that rides upon the water?
O no, it is that other gentle bird,

Which is the patron of our noble calling.
I well remember in my early years,

When these young hands first closed upon a goose.
I have a scar upon my thimble finger,

Which chronicles the hour of young ambition.
My father was a tailor, and his father,

And my great grandsire, all of them were tailors.
They had an ancient goose-it was an heir-loom
From some remoter tailor of our race-

I am not certain, but I think 't was he,

Who happened to be hanged by some misfortune.
No matter; but I saw it on a time

When none was near, and I did deal with it,
And it did burn me-oh, most fearfully!
-It is a joy to straiten out one's limbs
And leap elastic from the level counter,
Leaving the petty grievances of earth,

The breaking thread, the din of clashing shears,
And all the needles that do wound the spirit,
For such a pensive hour of soothing thought.
Kind nature, shuffling in her loose undress,
Lays bare her shady bosom-I can feel
With all around me--I can hail the flowers
That make earth's mantle-and that quiet bird,
That rides the stream, is to me as a brother.
The vulgar know not all the hidden pockets
Where nature stows away her loveliness.
But this unaltered posture of the legs
Cramps my extended calves, and I must go
Where I can coil them in their wonted fashion.

HOMER.

In a little essay on Ossian, Mr. Editor, published in your second number, we ventured a few disparaging remarks upon Homer. For this audacious rebellion against the supremacy of the father of poetry, and the decrees of commentators and translators innumerable, we hasten to make some amends; by saying all the good we can of the old Grecian, and doing fealty as far as conscience will permit.

We think, then, that Homer narrates clearly and interestingly; that there is variety in his characters and incidents; that he usually succeeds, when he attempts giving an impressive picture of a physical object or process; that his orators' harangues are often artfully rhetorical; that his diction is, for the most part, simple and forcible, and his numbers sonorous.

But farther we cannot go. Our complaint of his continually dragging into his work, matter really, unqualifiedly, and sordidly prosaic, and which has therefore no business in poetry, we have not seen cause, upon farther reflection, to drop. His taste was essentially rude. And here there needs no apologetic exclamation about the antiquity of his era; for there is a natural perception of propriety, and sensibility to beauty and its opposite, which we have a right to expect of a great poet, how primitive soever. Hector, the faultless husband, father, and son-the devoted, and noble-minded guardian of his country--is characterized in the last line of the Iliad, as the horse-breaker! s oiy àμqisлov tápov Εκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο.

The occasional harangues of the chieftains, passing over the circumstance of their being almost always three or four times too long, we have acknowledged to be skilful forensics. Yet what impartial reader will compare them, for vivid and characteristic exhibition of deep passion and broad thought, with the speeches in the second book of Paradise Lost; or, for practical eloquence, seductive, resistless, and overpowering, with the oration of Shakspeare's Mark Anthony?

But deficiencies of art and taste do not involve all that we find to complain of in Homer. He wanted rich and glowing imagination. This we conclude partly from the style of his Epithets. Profusely as he uses them, we seldom meet one

in his poetry which is startling, or impressive: his epithets are uniform, and often, of course, tame and inappropriate. They do not seem like the suggestions of excited thought; but are usually applied to an object with very little reference to its present condition or to the light in which he is viewing it. He appears to have gathered a store of these expressions before he began to compose, and the contents of the Vocabulary he scatters over his pages without economy or selection. Whenever a truce takes place, we are told that arms are thrown down upon the fertile earth. Being wont to call Ajax a bulwark, the bard, in the beginning of the sixth book of the Iliad, presents to us "Ajax, bulwark of the Greeks, breaking through the enemy's ranks." Menelaus cannot be spoken of, whether by Greek, or Trojan, his wife, his brother, or his troops,---as an object of love, hatred, or admiration, or casually and with utter indifference,---but it is Menelaus yellow-haired, or loud-shouting. Seldom, indeed, does a proper name, whether of person or thing, occur--however hasty the speech or unimpassioned the narrative--which does not occupy a line with commonplace appellatives, patronymics, &c. When Menelaus receives his wound from Pandarus, and while the blood is pouring out of it, Agamemnon makes him a long speech. At its close he dispatches his aid-de-camp after the army surgeon, Machaon. This order is given under such circumstances, one would think, as to suggest all convenient brevity; but the generalissimo cannot condescend to less than five lines, in the course of which he takes occasion to denominate Machaon, a man, and a son of Esculapius, a blameless physician---and Menelaus, a warrior, and a chief of the Greeks.

This is a sad use, or rather abuse, of a class of words which the Jewish prophets wielded so sublimely, from which the Roman Lyrist distilled so much of his curiosa felicitas, and which our own Shakspeare has made so efficient, as they drop from the lips of his dramatis personæ, in distinguishing a thousand shades of character.

The last instance which we quoted of Homer's random and unseasonable epithetizing, has tended, among many similar passages, to convince us of what we have seen somewhere shrewdly guessed, that he was, not only nationally but individually, a loquacious fellow---in college phrase, a yarner.

This is put beyond doubt, by the multitude of wordy speeches which he introduces upon occasions, when the reader is greatly indisposed to be interrupted by them, when the poet should have been in a state of feeling equally indisrosed to compose them, and when it is a moral impossibility that his characters should have uttered them. One of the most remarkable is that of Dione to her daughter Venus, who had been wounded by Diomede. The good mother addresses half a page of far-fetched consolation to the child who is agonizing at her feet, and then effects a perfect cure, by rubbing her hand across the wound! Now to touch her daughter's wrist was so simple an operation, that some care must have been necessary to avoid doing it. Why then "in the name of all the gods at once," did not Dione dispel the anguish, before she manufactured her speech?

As the ice is now broken, we had better perhaps give up squeamishness, go the full length of our real sentiments, and acknowledge at once that we do not think Homer a very original writer.Can it be that we are sitting here, safe and sound, after that profane declaration-that the spirits of the Scholiast, of Clarke, and Dacier have not risen to blast us-that no sudden gust has snatched away our paper-that this pale pen still reclines among our trembling fingers? We are emboldened, and will proceed. We certainly do not conceive originality to consist in having written a great while ago-in other words, that a chronological table is a complete index to the comparative originality of all authors. He is original, who views and sets forth things in a different light, conceives and expresses thought differently,—from other men, preceding or cotemporary. Has Homer done this, in any remarkable degree? We have endeavoured to point out some particulars, in which he is at once tame and unnatural. Now these are the very points, and in our opinion almost the only ones, in which he is a nointηs, an originator, in which he is any other than the mere representative of the men, or chronicler of the events, of his age. sentiments are just such as we can conceive all, with whom he conversed, to have entertained; his heroes are just such warriors, marked by such vulgar characteristics, and acting from such ordinary motives, as we should suppose any extensive military movement, in those times, would display; whilst his whole system of supernaturals, more his own, prob

His