Onward, in haste, Llewelyn passed,
And on went Gêlert too;
And still, where'er his eyes he cast,
Fresh blood-gouts shocked his view.
O'erturned his infant's bed he found,
With blood-stained covert rent;
And all around, the walls and ground
With recent blood besprent.

He called his child-no voice replied-
He searched with terror wild;
Blood, blood he found on every side,

But nowhere found his child. 'Hell-hound! my child's by thee devoured,'

The frantic father cried;

And to the hilt his vengeful sword
He plunged in Gêlert's side.

His suppliant looks, as prone he fell,
No pity could impart ;

But still his Gêlert's dying yell
Passed heavy o'er his heart.

Aroused by Gêlert's dying yell,

Some slumberer wakened nigh:
What words the parent's joy could tell
To hear his infant's cry!
Concealed beneath a tumbled heap
His hurried search had missed,
All glowing from his rosy sleep,

The cherub boy he kissed.

Nor scathe had he, nor harm, nor dread,
But, the same couch beneath,

Lay a gaunt wolf, all torn and dead,
Tremendous still in death.

Ah, what was then Llewelyn's pain!
For now the truth was clear;

His gallant hound the wolf had slain
To save Llewelyn's heir.

Vain, vain was all Llewelyn's woe;
'Best of thy kind, adieu !

The frantic blow which laid thee low
This heart shall ever rue.'
And now a gallant tomb they raise,
With costly sculpture decked;
And marbles storied with his praise
Poor Gelert's bones protect.
There, never could the spearman pass,
Or forester unmoved;
There, oft the tear-besprinkled grass
Llewelyn's sorrow proved.

And there he hung his horn and spear,
And there, as evening fell,

In fancy's ear he oft would hear
Poor Gêlert's dying yell.

And, till great Snowden's rocks grow old,
And cease the storm to brave,
The consecrated spot shall hold
The name of Gêlert's Grave.

The Visionary.

When midnight o'er the moonless skies Her pall of transient death has spread, When mortals sleep, when spectres rise, And nought is wakeful but the dead:

No bloodless shape my way pursues,

No sheeted ghost my couch annoys; Visions more sad my fancy views,

Visions of long-departed joys!

The shade of youthful hope is there, That lingered long, and latest died; Ambition all dissolved to air,

With phantom honours by his side.

What empty shadows glimmer nigh?

They once were Friendship, Truth, and Love!
Oh, die to thought, to memory die,

Since lifeless to my heart ye prove!

These last two verses Sir Walter Scott, who knew and esteemed Spencer, quotes in his diary as fine lines' expressing his own feelings amidst the wreck of his fortunes at Abbotsford. A Memoir of Spencer was prefixed to a volume of his poems reprinted in 1835.

Francis Wrangham (1769–1842), son of a Yorkshire farmer, studied at Cambridge, and became an accomplished classic, English poet, and miscellaneous writer. With Basil Montagu's assistance he took in pupils at his Surrey curacy, issuing an elaborate scheme of study which led Sir James Mackintosh to say: 'A boy thus educated will be a walking encyclopædia;' he was ultimately Archdeacon of the East Riding of Yorkshire and Prebendary of Chester. The thirty-six publications by him named in the Dictionary of National Biography comprise Latin poems, English poems, songs; translations from Aristophanes, Virgil, Horace, Petrarch; sermons, books on the evidences of Christianity, and the English version commonly printed of Milton's second Defensio.

Sir John Malcolm (1769-1833) was born at Burnfoot near Langholm, and at thirteen entered the Madras army; distinguished himself at Seringapatam (1799) and in the wars with the Pindaris and Holkar; and besides holding minor political appointments in Mysore, the Deccan, &c., was thrice ambassador to Persia in 1800-10, and Governor of Bombay (1827-30). In 1812-17 and again in 1822-30 he was in England, being knighted in 1812; in due time he became G.C.B.; and having entered Parliament in 1831, opposed the Reform Bill. Several of his works became standard authorities: A History of Persia (1815), Memoir of Central India (1823), Political History of India, 1784-1823 (1826), Sketches in Persia (1827), and Life of Clive (1836). A Life of him was written by Kaye (1856).

James Montgomery (1771-1854) was born at Irvine in Ayrshire, the son of a Moravian pastor, who from Ireland went to Barbadoes in 1783, and there died. The boy had in 1777 been sent to the Moravian school at Fulneck near Leeds, and, after ten dreamy years there, was put apprentice to a grocer at Mirfield. In his sixteenth year, with 3s. 6d. in his pocket, he ran away from Mirfield, and, after some suffering, became a shop-boy in the village of Wath. He next tried London, carrying with him a collection of his poems, but failed to obtain a publisher. In 1792 he was clerk

in a newspaper office in Sheffield; four years later he became editor of the Sheffield Iris, a weekly journal, which he conducted on Liberal lines and in a kindly spirit till 1825. But his course did not always run smooth. In January 1795 he was tried for having struck off a broadsheet ballad by a Belfast clergyman on the demolition of the Bastille; it was really his predecessor who had printed it, but Montgomery was sentenced to three months' imprisonment in York Castle, and a fine of £20. In January 1796, tried for a paragraph in his paper on the conduct of a magistrate in quelling a riot at Sheffield, he was again convicted, and sentenced to six months' imprisonment and a fine of £30.

The Wanderer of Switzerland, and other Poems

JAMES MONTGOMERY.

From an Engraving after Chantrey.

(1806), dealing with the French occupation, was his first poem to catch the public ear, and speedily went through two editions; his publishers had just issued a third, when the Edinburgh Review of January 1807 denounced the unfortunate volume in a style of such authoritative reprobation as no mortal verse could be expected to survive,' and prophesied immediate oblivion for the author and all his works. Nevertheless a score of editions of what is admittedly a feeble poem appeared: a lyric in it, 'The Grave,' has been always recognised as one of his best things; both Blackwood and Byron commended it. The West Indies (1809), written (in heroic couplets) in honour of the abolition of the slave-trade, is an eloquent, sincere, and tender expression of the kindlier sentiment of the time. Prison Amusements he had written during his nine months' confinement in York Castle. The World before the Flood, a more elaborate poem in ten

cantos, describes with much energy and with frequent touches of real human interest the antediluvian patriarchs in their happy valley, the invasion of Eden by the descendants of Cain, the loves of Javan and Zillah, the translation of Enoch, and the final deliverance of the little band o patriarchal families from the giants. Thoughts on Wheels (1817) was a verse denunciation of State lotteries; and The Climbing Boy's Soliloquies, also in verse, was levelled by him and others against the cruel practice of sending boys up chimneys. Greenland (1819), a poem in five cantos, dealing with the Ancient Moravian Church, its revival in the eighteenth century, and its missions to Greenland, secured favour even outside devout circles both by descriptive power and narrative interest. Montgomery's only other long poem, The Pelican Island, in nine cantos of blank verse, was suggested by a passage in Captain Flinders's voyage to Terra Australis, describing the ancient haunts of the pelican on the small islands off the Australian coast.

He wrote also a number of short pieces published in periodicals, short translations from Dante and Petrarch, and many hymns which have found wide acceptance, such as 6 Go to dark Gethsemane,' 'For ever with the Lord,' 'Songs of praise the angels sang,' 'Hail to the Lord's anointed,' 'According to thy gracious word,' and 'Pour out thy spirit from on high.' Dr John Julian computes that about a hundred of his hymns are still in common use. His selection of hymns, with introduction and notes, called The Christian Psalmist (1825), has been said to have laid the foundation of scientific hymnology. In 1830 and 1831 he delivered a course of lectures at the Royal Institution on Poetry and General Literature, published in 1833. A pension of £150, conferred at the instance of Sir Robert Peel in 1835, he enjoyed till his death, at eighty-three, in 1854 Montgomery was a warm-hearted, earnest, good man, a philanthropist universally esteemed, but was great neither as a thinker nor as a poet. His later poems, just touched by Shelley's influence instead of Campbell's, are decidedly better than his earlier. The longer ones are too long, and tediously didactic, though relieved here and there by admirable descriptive passages. 'Conscience, the bosom-hell of guilty man;' 'Where justice reigns, 'tis freedom to obey;' and the like fragments quoted from him, are rather ethical maxims than poetical thoughts. Many of his shorter pieces and lyrics are really fine, but his following was always mainly amongst those who sympathised most heartily with his theological views and prized his works for their religious tone and ethical teaching. He did not overestimate his own powers as a poet, and frankly anticipated that none of his poems would live-'except perhaps a few of my hymns.' He was apparently a true prophet; save for the hymns and a few selections, he is even now hardly read or remembered.

From 'Greenland.'

'Tis sunset; to the firmament serene
The Atlantic wave reflects a gorgeous scene;
Broad in the cloudless west, a belt of gold
Girds the blue hemisphere; above unrolled
The keen clear air grows palpable to sight,
Embodied in a flush of crimson light,

Through which the evening-star, with milder gleam,
Descends to meet her image in the stream.
Far in the east, what spectacle unknown
Allures the eye to gaze on it alone?
Amidst black rocks, that lift on either hand
Their countless peaks, and mark receding land;
Amidst a tortuous labyrinth of seas,
That shine around the Arctic Cyclades ;
Amidst a coast of dreariest continent,
In many a shapeless promontory rent ;

O'er rocks, seas, islands, promontories spread,
The ice-blink rears its undulated head,

On which the sun, beyond the horizon shrined,
Hath left his richest garniture behind;
Piled on a hundred arches, ridge by ridge,
O'er fixed and fluid strides the alpine bridge,
Whose blocks of sapphire seem to mortal eye
Hewn from cerulean quarries in the sky;
With glacier battlements that crowd the spheres,
The slow creation of six thousand years,
Amidst immensity it towers sublime,
Winter's eternal palace, built by Time:
All human structures by his touch are borne

Down to the dust; mountains themselves are worn
With his light footsteps; here for ever grows,
Amid the region of unmelting snows,

A monument; where every flake that falls
Gives adamantine firmness to the walls.
The sun beholds no mirror in his race,
That shews a brighter image of his face;
The stars, in their nocturnal vigils, rest
Like signal-fires on its illumined crest;
The gliding moon around the ramparts wheels,
And all its magic lights and shades reveals;
Beneath, the tide with equal fury raves,
To undermine it through a thousand caves;
Rent from its roof, though thundering fragments oft
Plunge to the gulf, immovable aloft,
From age to age, in air, o'er sea, on land,
Its turrets heighten and its piers expand.

Hark! through the calm and silence of the scene, Slow, solemn, sweet, with many a pause between, Celestial music swells along the air!

No! 'tis the evening-hymn of praise and prayer
From yonder deck, where, on the stern retired,
Three humble voyagers, with looks inspired,
And hearts enkindled with a holier flame
Than ever lit to empire or to fame,
Devoutly stand: their choral accents rise
On wings of harmony beyond the skies;
And, 'midst the songs that seraph-minstrels sing,
Day without night, to their immortal king,
These simple strains, which erst Bohemian hills
Echoed to pathless woods and desert rills,

Now heard from Shetland's azure bound-are known
In heaven; and He who sits upon the throne
In human form, with mediatorial power,
Remembers Calvary, and hails the hour

When, by the Almighty Father's high decree,
The utmost north to him shall bow the knee,
And, won by love, an untamed rebel-race
Kiss the victorious sceptre of his grace.

Then to his eye, whose instant glance pervades
Heaven's heights, earth's circle, hell's profoundest shades,
Is there a group more lovely than those three
Night-watching pilgrims on the lonely sea?
Or to his ear, that gathers in one sound
The voices of adoring worlds around,
Comes there a breath of more delightful praise
Than the faint notes his poor disciples raise,
Ere on the treacherous main they sink to rest,
Secure as leaning on their Master's breast?

They sleep; but memory wakes; and dreams array Night in a lively masquerade of day;

The land they seek, the land they leave behind,
Meet on mid-ocean in the plastic mind;
One brings forsaken home and friends so nigh,
That tears in slumber swell the unconscious eye:
The other opens, with prophetic view,
Perils which e'en their fathers never knew
(Though schooled by suffering, long inured to toil,
Outcasts and exiles from their natal soil);

Strange scenes, strange men; untold, untried distress;
Pain, hardships, famine, cold, and nakedness,
Diseases; death in every hideous form,

On shore, at sea, by fire, by flood, by storm;
Wild beasts, and wilder men-unmoved with fear,
Health, comfort, safety, life, they count not dear,
May they but hope a Saviour's love to shew,
And warn one spirit from eternal woe:
Nor will they faint, nor can they strive in vain,
Since thus to live is Christ, to die is gain.

'Tis morn: the bathing moon her lustre shrouds ;
Wide o'er the east impends an arch of clouds
That spans the ocean; while the infant dawn
Peeps through the portal o'er the liquid lawn,
That ruffled by an April gale appears,
Between the gloom and splendour of the spheres,
Dark-purple as the moorland heath, when rain
Hangs in low vapours over the autumnal plain :
Till the full sun, resurgent from the flood,
Looks on the waves, and turns them into blood;
But quickly kindling, as his beams aspire,
The lambent billows play in forms of fire.
Where is the vessel? shining through the light,
Like the white sea-fowl's horizontal flight,
Yonder she wings, and skims, and cleaves her way
Through refluent foam and iridescent spray.

Light as a flake of foam upon the wind,
Keel-upward from the deep emerged a shell,
Shaped like the moon ere half her horn is filled;
Fraught with young life, it righted as it rose,
And moved at will along the yielding water.
The native pilot of this little bark

Put out a tier of oars on either side,
Spread to the wafting breeze a twofold sail,
And mounted up and glided down the billow
In happy freedom, pleased to feel the air,
And wander in the luxury of light.
Worth all the dead creation, in that hour,
To me appeared this lonely Nautilus,

My fellow-being, like myself alive.

Entranced in contemplation, vague yet sweet,
I watched its vagrant course and rippling wake,
Till I forgot the sun amidst the heavens.

It closed, sunk, dwindled to a point, then nothing;
While the last bubble crowned the dimpling eddy,
Through which mine eye still giddily pursued it,
A joyous creature vaulted through the air-
The aspiring fish that fain would be a bird,
On long, light wings, that flung a diamond-shower

Of dew-drops round its evanescent form,
Sprang into light, and instantly descended.
Ere I could greet the stranger as a friend,
Or mourn his quick departure, on the surge
A shoal of dolphins, tumbling in wild glee,
Glowed with such orient tints, they might have been
The rainbow's offspring, when it met the ocean
In that resplendent vision I had seen.
While yet in ecstasy I hung o'er these,
With every motion pouring out fresh beauties,
As though the conscious colours came and went
At pleasure, glorying in their subtle changes
Enormous o'er the flood, Leviathan
Looked forth, and from his roaring nostrils sent
Two fountains to the sky, then plunged amain
In headlong pastime through the closing gulf.

Aspirations of Youth.

Higher, higher, will we climb,

Up the mount of glory,

That our names may live through time

In our country's story;

Happy, when her welfare calls,
He who conquers, he who falls!

Deeper, deeper, let us toil

In the mines of knowledge; Nature's wealth and learning's spoil,

Win from school and college; Delve we there for richer gems Than the stars of diadems. Onward, onward, will we press Through the path of duty; Virtue is true happiness,

Excellence true beauty.
Minds are of supernal birth,
Let us make a heaven of earth.

Closer, closer, then we knit
Hearts and hands together,
Where our fireside comforts sit,
In the wildest weather;
Oh, they wander wide who roam,
For the joys of life, from home.

Nearer, dearer bands of love
Draw our souls in union,
To our Father's house above,
To the saints' communion;
Thither every hope ascend,
There may all our labours end.

The Common Lot.

Once, in the flight of ages past,
There lived a man: and who was he?
Mortal! howe'er thy lot be cast,
That man resembled thee.

Unknown the region of his birth,

The land in which he died unknown:
His name has perished from the earth,
This truth survives alone :

That joy, and grief, and hope, and fear,
Alternate triumphed in his breast;
His bliss and woe-a smile, a tear!
Oblivion hides the rest.

The bounding pulse, the languid limb,
The changing spirits' rise and fall;
We know that these were felt by him,
For these are felt by all.

He suffered-but his pangs are o'er ;
Enjoyed-but his delights are fled;
Had friends-his friends are now no more;
And foes-his foes are dead.

He loved-but whom he loved the grave
Hath lost in its unconscious womb :
Oh, she was fair! but nought could save
Her beauty from the tomb.

He saw whatever thou hast seen;
Encountered all that troubles thee:
He was whatever thou hast been;
He is what thou shalt be.

The rolling seasons, day and night,
Sun, moon, and stars, the earth and main,
Erewhile his portion, life, and light,

To him exist in vain.

The clouds and sunbeams, o'er his eye That once their shades and glory threw, Have left in yonder silent sky

No vestige where they flew.

The annals of the human race,

Their ruins, since the world began,
Of him afford no other trace
Than this-there lived a man!

Prayer.

Prayer is the soul's sincere desire
Uttered or unexpressed;

The motion of a hidden fire

That trembles in the breast.
Prayer is the burden of a sigh,
The falling of a tear;
The upward glancing of an eye,
When none but God is near.

Prayer is the simplest form of speech
That infant lips can try;
Prayer the sublimest strains that reach
The Majesty on high.

Prayer is the Christian's vital breath,

The Christian's native air;

His watchword at the gates of death:
He enters heaven by prayer.
Prayer is the contrite sinner's voice
Returning from his ways;
While angels in their songs rejoice,

And say, 'Behold, he prays!'
The saints in prayer appear as one
In word, and deed, and mind,
When with the Father and his Son
Their fellowship they find.

Nor prayer is made on earth alone:
The Holy Spirit pleads;
And Jesus, on the eternal throne,
For sinners intercedes.

O Thou, by whom we come to God,
The Life, the Truth, the Way,
The path of prayer thyself hast trod :
Lord, teach us how to pray!
Home.

There is a land, of every land the pride,
Beloved by heaven o'er all the world beside;
Where brighter suns dispense serener light,
And milder moons emparadise the night;
A land of beauty, virtue, valour, truth,
Time-tutored age, and love-exalted youth.
The wandering mariner, whose eye explores
The wealthiest isles, the most enchanting shores,
Views not a realm so bountiful and fair,
Nor breathes the spirit of a purer air;
In every clime the magnet of his soul,
Touched by remembrance, trembles to that pole;
For in this land of heaven's peculiar grace,
The heritage of nature's noblest race,

There is a spot of earth supremely blest, A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest, Where man, creation's tyrant, casts aside His sword and sceptre, pageantry and pride, While in his softened looks benignly blend The sire, the son, the husband, brother, friend. Here woman reigns; the mother, daughter, wife, Strew with fresh flowers the narrow way of life! In the clear heaven of her delightful eye, An angel-guard of loves and graces lie; Around her knees domestic duties meet, And fireside pleasures gambol at her feet. Where shall that land, that spot of earth be found? Art thou a man?—a patriot ?—look around; Oh, thou shalt find, howe'er thy footsteps roam, That land thy country, and that spot thy home! Montgomery's works, in four volumes, were published in 1851, and continued to be occasionally reprinted; and portentous Memoirs were published by his friends Holland and Everett (7 vols. 1854-56).

Thomas Hope (1770?-1831), the author of Anastasius, was one of three brothers, merchantprinces of Amsterdam, whose Scottish ancestor settled in Holland in the seventeenth century. When a young man he studied architecture as a profession, and spent some years sketching buildings in Egypt, Greece, Syria, Turkey, Sicily, and Spain. On the French occupation of Holland, he settled in London, purchased a town house and a country mansion (Deepdene, near Dorking), which he decorated with magnificence; and in his splendid galleries he collected sculptures, vases, antiques, and pictures. In 1807 he published a folio volume of drawings and descriptions of Household Furniture and Decorations. The ambitious style, and the author's then quite eccentric devotion to the forms of chairs, sofas, couches, and tables, provoked a witty piece of ridicule in the Edinburgh Review; Byron jeered at him as a house-furnisher. But Hope had his revenge; through his efforts a change of taste observably gained ground. Two other splendid publications, The Costume of the Ancients (1809) and Designs of Modern Costumes (1812) show wide knowledge and curious research. In 1819 Hope dawned on society as a novelist of the first order. He had studied human nature as well as architecture and costume, and his travels had brought him into close contact with men of various creed and race. The result was Anastasius, or Memoirs of a Modern Greek, written at the close of the Eighteenth Century, in three volumes, anonymously published as a veritable history. credited to Byron and others, and the idea of Hope's authorship was ridiculed till he expressly announced in Blackwood that it was his. And then Hope, from being reputed a learned upholsterer or clever draftsman, was at once elevated into a rivalry with Byron as a painter of foreign scenery and manners, and with Le Sage and the other masters of the picaresque novel. The author, turning from fiction to philosophy, wrote next On the Origin and Prospects of Man; and amidst his paradoxes, unorthodox conceits, and abstruse speculations are many original suggestions and eloquent disquisi

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