Where chiefs or legislators lie,
Whose triumphs move before my eye,
In arms and antique pomp arrayed;
While now I taste the Ionian song,
Now bend to Plato's godlike tongue
Resounding through the olive shade.

VIII.

But should some cheerful, equal friend,
Bid leave the studious page a while,
Let mirth on wisdom then attend,
And social ease on learned toil;
Then while, at love's uncareful shrine,
Each dictates to the god of wine
Her name whom all his hopes obey,
What flattering dreams each bosom warm,
While absence, heightening every charm,
Invokes the slow-returning May!

IX.

May, thou delight of heaven and earth,
When will thy genial star arise?

The auspicious morn, which gives thee birth,
Shall bring Eudora to my eyes.
Within her sylvan haunt behold,
As in the happy garden old,
She moves like that primeval fair:
Thither ye silver-sounding lyres,
Ye tender smiles, ye chaste desires,
Fond hope and mutual faith, repair.

X.

And if believing love can read

His better omens in her eye,

Then shall my fears, O charming maid,
And every pain of absence die :

Then shall my jocund harp, attuned
To thy true ear, with sweeter sound

Pursue the free Horatian song;
Old Tyne shall listen to my tale,
And echo down the bordering vale,
The liquid melody prolong.

FOR A GRO TO.

To me, whom in their lays the shepherds call
Actæa, daughter of the neighbouring stream,
This cave belongs. The fig-tree and the vine,
Which o'er the rocky entrance downward shoot,
Were placed by Glycon. He with cowslips pale,
Primrose and purple lychnis, decked the green
Before my threshold, and my shelving walls
With honeysuckle covered. Here, at noon,
Lulled by the murmur of my rising fount,
I slumber: here my clustering fruits I tend,
Or from the humid flowers at break of day
Fresh garlands weave, and chase from all my bounds
Each thing impure or noxious. Enter in,
O Stranger, undismayed. Nor bat nor toad
Here lurks ; and, if thy breast of blameless thoughts
Approve thee, not unwelcome shalt thou tread
My quiet mansion: chiefly if thy name
Wise Pallas and the immortal Muses own.

CHRISTOPHER SMART.

[CHRISTOPHER SMART was born at Shipbourne in Kent on April 11, 1722. He was educated at Durham School and at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, becoming a Fellow in 1745. In 1753 he married and came to live in London, where his careless habits soon brought him into grave difficulties. He was for some time out of his mind, and it was during his confinement, in an interval of sanity, that the Song to David was written. In 1770 he closed a life in which he had known all forms of disappointment and unhappiness. His poems were fist collected in 1753, and a posthumous edition in two volumes was published in 1791. The Song to David appeared in a separate quarto in 1763, and was republished in 1819 by the Rev. R. Harvey.]

The posthumous Editor of Smart's poems makes an apology for the entire exclusion of the Song to David and some other pieces on the ground that 'they were written after the author's confinement, and bear for the most part melancholy proofs of the recent estrangement of his mind. Such poems however,' he adds, 'have been selected from his pamphlets and inserted in the present work as were likely to be acceptable to the reader.' The volumes so introduced contain a curious assemblage of quite worthless verses; Seatonian prize-poems, epigrams, birthday addresses, imitations of Pope and Gay, and all else that might be expected from a facile and uninspired versifier of that date. Two generations ago Smart's name was familiar to schoolboys from his translation of Horace into prose; a work about as worthy of immortality as were his initative verses. It is only in our own day that attention has been recalled to the single poem by which he deserves to be not only remembered, but remembered as a poet who for one short moment reached a height to which the prosaic muse of his epoch was wholly unaccustomed. There is nothing like the Song to David in the eighteenth century; there is nothing out of which it might seem

to have been developed It is true that with great appearance of symmetry it is ill-arranged and out of proportion; its hundred stanzas weary the reader with their repetitions and with their epithets piled up on a too obvious system. But in spite of this touch of pedantry, it is the work of a poet; of a man so possessed with the beauty and fervour of the Psalms and with the high romance of the psalmist's life that in the days of his madness the character of David has become a 'fixed idea' with him, to be embodied in words and dressed in the magic robe of verse when the dark hour has gone by. There are few episodes in our literary history more interesting than this of the wretched bookseller's hack, with his mind thrown off its balance by drink and poverty, rising at the instant of his deepest distress to a pitch of poetic performance unimagined by himself at all other times, unimagined by all but one or two of his contemporaries, and so little appreciated by the public that when an edition of his writings was called for it was sent into the world with this masterpiece omitted.

EDITOR.

A SONG TO DAVID.

VOL. III.

O Thou that sit'st upon a throne,
With harp of high majestic tone,
To praise the King of kings;
And voice of heaven-ascending swell,
Which, while its deeper notes excel,
Clear as a clarion rings:

To bless each valley, grove and coast,
And charm the cherubs to the post
Of gratitude in throngs;

To keep the days on Zion's mount,
And send the year to his account
With dances and with songs:

O servant of God's holiest charge,
The minister of praise at large,

Which thou may'st now receive;
From thy blest mansion hail and hear,
From topmost eminence appear

To this the wreath I weave.

Great, valiant, pious, good, and clean,
Sublime, contemplative, serene,

Strong, constant, pleasant, wise!
Bright effluence of exceeding grace;
Best man!-the swiftness and the race,
The peril, and the prize!

Great-from the lustre of his crown,
From Samuel's horn and God's renown
Which is the people's voice;
For all the host, from rear to van,
Applauded and embraced the man-
The man of God's own choice.

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