Poor CHATTERTON! farewell! of darkest hues

This chaplet cast I on thy shapeless tomb;
But dare no longer on the sad theme muse,

Lest kindred woes persuade a kindred doom!

Hence, gloomy thoughts! no more my soul shall dwell
On joys that were! No more endure to weigh
The shame and anguish of the evil day,

Wisely forgetful! O'er the ocean swell

Sublime of Hope I seek the cottag'd dell

Where VIRTUE calm with careless step may stray; And, dancing to the moonlight roundelay,

The wizard PASSIONS weave an holy spell !

O CHATTERTON! that thou wert yet alive!
Sure thou would'st spread the canvass to the gale,
And love, with us, the tinkling team to drive
O'er peaceful Freedom's UNDIVIDED dale;

And we, at sober eve, would round thee throng,

Hanging, enraptur'd, on thy stately song!

And greet with smiles the

young-eyed POESY All deftly mask'd, as hoar ANTIQUITY,

Alas vain Phantasies! the fleeting brood
Of Woe self-solac'd in her dreamy mood!
Yet will I love to follow the sweet dream,
Where Susquehannah pours his untam'd stream;
And on some hill, whose forest-frowning side
Waves o'er the murmurs of his calmer tide,
Will raise a solemn CENOTAPH to thee,

Sweet Harper of time-shrouded MINSTRELSY!
And there, sooth'd sadly by the dirgeful wind,
Muse on the sore ills I had left behind.

October, 1794.

Sonnets.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SONNETS.

The composition of the Sonnet has been regulated by Boileau in his Art of Poetry, and since Boileau, by William Preston, in the elegant preface to his Amatory Poems: the rules, which they would establish, are founded on the practice of Petrarch. I have never yet been able to discover sense, nature, or poetic fancy in Petrarch's poems; they appear to me all one cold glitter of heavy conceits and metaphysical abstractions. However, Petrarch, although not the inventor of the Sonnet, was the first who made it popular; and his countrymen have taken his poems as the model. Charlotte Smith and Bowles are they who first made the Sonnet popular among the present English: I am justified therefore by analogy in dedueing its laws from their compositions.

The Sonnet then is a small poem, in which some lonely feeling is developed. It is limited to a particular number of lines, in order that the reader's mind having expected the close at the place in which he finds it, may rest satisfied; and that so the poem may acquire, as it were, a Totality, — in plainer phrase, may become a Whole. It is confined to fourteen lines,