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ORIGINAL POETRY.

THE PERPETUAL YOUTH OF NATURE.

A SOLILOQUY.

With what a hollow voice these broken ruins
Tell of the vanished past. Here they are thrown
Too rudely for the most inquiring eye

To read one legend of the men who reared them,
Or even form a guess of those who made
These walls their home. It is a beautiful clime,
And all the year is lovely on these shores;
For there is neither winter here to blight,
Nor the hot sun to dry the fountains up,
And make the plains a desert. Nature here
Has built her bower of evergreens; and flowers
Are never wanting for her festivals,

And these are every day, and there is in them
Such a perpetual variety

Of bright and fair, the heart is never weary
Of the soft revelry ;-and yet no trace
Of human footsteps on the bordering sands
Of the calm ocean, gives a sign that man
Has found his way before me to this haunt
Of silence and repose. Well, be it so,
And I will hold myself the rightful lord
Of all this fair domain, by the strong claim
Of first discovery. No inheritance
Of gilded palaces, or loaded fields
Bent with a thousand harvests, could so fill
My spirit with the stirring health of joy,
As thus to hold myself the sole possessor
Of such a solitude-so full of life,
And yet so mute,—so bright and beautiful,
And yet so darkly shadowed with the pall
Of buried ages. How the merry vines
Go gadding in the brisk and spirited air,
That even calls from out the barren rocks

A welcoming smile. The wind is very low-
It hardly wags the shrinking violet,

Or sends a quiver to the aspen leaf,

Or curls the green wave on the pebbled shore,
Or gives a wrinkle to the quiet sea,

That, like a giant resting from his toil,

Sleeps in the morning sun. That flowery palm

Has a most glorious aspect, as he bows
In silent worship to his rising god;
And from his station on the tallest pile
Of these mysterious ruins, once the shrine,
It may be, of the living Sun himself,
How like a most majestic sovereign
He keeps his lofty seat, and yet adores
The Lord that made him. It is wonderful,
That man should hold himself so haughtily,
And talk of an immortal name, and feed
His proud ambition with such daring hopes,
As creatures of a more eternal nature
Alone should form. Why, 't is a mockery
Too poor for tears, and yet too sad for smiles,
To think how much of glitter and of pride
Has flaunted in the Sun, and sent him back
His fullest beams. These rude disjointed heaps,
That seem the chaos of a broken world,
And hardly give us signs enough to show,
They were not thrown from out the central earth
By an upheaving earthquake-these were bright
With such barbaric pomp, as made the Sun
Muffle his head, and hide himself at noon
To shun the poor encounter. So they sung,
The sycophants, who told the gorgeous tyrant
Of these once peopled shores, he was a god,
And with the port and bearing of a god
Sat on his throne, or in his chariot
Went sounding on his long triumphal way.

Fools! and where are they? Not a mark to tell
The shadows of their names-The tooth of Time
Has ground the marble sculptures to rude forms
Such as the falling waters eat from rocks
In the deep gloom of caves;-and yet, as if
They meant to show their scorn of him, who calls
Himself their lord, the beasts and creeping things
Have come from out their deserts and their holes,
And made their dens in the crushed palaces,
And round the buried altars hollowed out
Their lurking-places. O! how fresh and fair
Grows the young grass, and how the wild vines clasp
The rifted columns, with as bright a foliage,
As when from out the bosom of the earth
First rose the rampant Spring, and the glad Sun
Laughed from his azure throne to see the buds
Put out their tender leaves, and the soft green
Spread like a carpet to the tented sky.

P.

A SIMPLE STORY.

There never was a gentler creature
In city, village, or in town,

Or one of lovelier heart and feature,
Or better taught than Anna Brown.
Her step was like the antelope's,
Her eye beamed like a startled kid's,
Her cheek soft blushing with the hopes
That youth into existence bids.

The village loved her, friendship hushed it;
And if the tale of slander came,

Both old and young rose up and crushed it,
And fixed on other cheeks the shame.
'T was seldom needed-female virtue
Has in itself protection strong;
And, maidens! if the viper hurt you,
It must be ye are in the wrong.

There came one day, to woo the maiden,
A sparkling youth in courtly guise,--
A rural lad with spring-flowers laden
To win to love the beauteous prize.
She takes, oh, simple girl! the former,
And sends the village swain away;
She'll find, alas! his cottage warmer
Than the proud dwelling of Jack Gray.

She married Jack, he spent his living
In thriftless aims, and deadly brawls;
And she, his wickedness forgiving,
Dwelt weeping in his lonely halls.
It seemed as if her soft form melted,
So thin and colourless see grew,
And they who saw how sorrow pelted,
Deemed that her days on earth were few.

He died, but not till his last shilling
Had wanton women's cravings fed ;
He left her pennyless, but willing
To earn by honest toil her bread.
She leaves the city, and its glitter,
Its grandeur oft from peace apart;
Deeming her native village fitter
To hide her broken hopes and heart.

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She reached it; scarce her mother knew her,
So blanched her cheek, and sunk her eye;
And the old friends that gathered to her,
Deemed 't was a phantom flitting by.
They press her hands, and some are kissing,
Try every art to make her glad;

None from the joyful group are missing,
E'en Willie comes, the baffled lad.

Hope and kind nursing to health brought her,
Again the rose bloomed on her cheek,
And lovers gay and wealthy sought her,
But grief has made her wishes meek.
She thanks them for their splendid proffers
Of jewels rich and trappings gay;

But says she better likes the offers,

That Willie makes the Widow Gray.

J.

CRITICAL NOTICES.

A Treatise on the Law of Descents in the several United States of America. By Tapping Reeve, Inte Chief Justice of Connecticut. New York, 1825. 8vo. pp. xxvii. and 515.

THE design of this book is clearly signified in its title. The author's view of the subject embraces all the Atlantic States, except Maine, whose recent separation from Massachusetts, probaly, induced him to think there was nothing sufficiently peculiar in its laws of descent to require distinct consideration. Of the Western States, he treats of none but Ohio. Whether Mr Reeve omitted the Mississippi states on account of the short time which had elapsed since their settlement, or for what other cause, we know not; but we regret that he past over Louisiana in particular, whose institutions have been influenced so much more than those of other states by the civil law, that the examination of them would have been well worth his attention. Lawyers in this country, we apprehend, are beginning to be satisfied of the importance to them of acquiring a knowledge of the civil law; and to despise the narrow prejudices, which have discouraged the study of it in England. And as nearly every thing estimable in the particular system of descents among us is borrowed from the civil law, while nearly all the defects of that system derive their origin from the common law, we should expect much profit from comparing the peculiarities of Louisiana with those of the Atlantic States.

But, within the limits of the author's plan, his book, although less meritorious and important than Mr Stearns's on Real Actions, is, like that, another valuable fruit of the establishment of law schools. It consists, first, of some general explanations of terms and principles in the law of descents, introductory to the main body of the work; then of an abstract of the rules of descent in the several states above described, illustrated by a great variety of cases supposed or collected; and lastly, of a general view of their differences in relation to certain principles, and a general view of all their respective peculiarities.

It would be foreign to our purpose to enter into a minute examination of Mr Reeve's work; nor do we feel competent to speak of the accuracy of all the parts of a treatise, containing an abridgment, upon a very nice and intricate subject, of the statute and expository law of fifteen states. But judging more confidently from a knowledge of the introductory matter and of the section on Massachusetts, than from the perusal of the rest of the work, we hesitate not to express an opinion that the profession will find it fraught with curious and useful instruction.

Few persons in this country can be ignorant of the immense superiority of our doctrine of descents, compared with the principles which regulate them at common law. The rules in the latter are essentially of feudal extraction. Hence the descent of the land in England to the oldest son to the exclusion of the rest. The feud having been originally granted to one individual, on condition of the grantee's rendering military service to the grantor, the perpetual integrity of the feud was deemed indispensable to the full discharge of that service. The possession of the feud being, also, frequently connected with a title of honour, it was necessary that the lands, which supported the rank, should descend indivisibly like the title. The forfeiture of lands by attainder, the exclusion of the half-blood, and other monstrous features of the common law, may, it is well known, be traced to the same barbarous and monarchical institutions established in the darkness of the middle ages. When the common law came to be, as it is with us, the law of a republican people, of a people whose fundamental maxims are the encouragement of industry, the promotion of general improvement, the abolition of all hereditary distinctions and of all the injurious privileges of birth, this law underwent of necessity very essential changes, in order to accommodate it to our situation, wants, and feelings.

The mode of change, in almost every case, has been to adopt, with various modifications, the rule of descents by the Roman law, that much calumniated code, whose genuine doctrines, being the growth of a republic, are certainly much more republican than those of the common law, the product of a monarchy. This

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