through Motherwell's poetry, had there not been added the gloomy and chilling influence of the political faith of which, as we have stated, he was a strenuous advocate. For what does High-Toryism in England mean, but despair of humanity? It looks around and abroad over the mass of men with no eye of hope, no heart of love. It distrusts, it fears, it despises, it hates. It beholds, in whatever direction it may turn, a hideous panorama of wretchedness and wickedness. It knows no other remedy than to hang the wickedness, and to crush the wretchedness down yet lower in the dust. It beholds the most frightful social disparities and contrasts, the most heinous wrongs and oppressions, which grind out of the toil, and sweat, and blood, and starvation, and ignorance, and crime of the ninety-nine, the aliment to the pride, and power, and pampered luxury of the one. It beholds all this, and it acquiesces in it, sustains it, justifies it. It recognises no equality, no brotherhood, and but faint and feeble human sympathy, with those wretched ninety-nine. It hardens its heart against them, and shuts its ear to the moaning of their misery. It considers that this state of things grows out of the radical evil of human nature, whose necessary law is to be bad and to be wretched; and which must be crushed and coerced by heavy superincumbent restraints upon every impulse that may move it in the direction of its native freedom. It dreads nothing more than the idea of popular liberty; for it has no love for mankind, no faith in it, no hope for it. Such is the spirit of English Toryism, and going forth out of the mind of the individual who may be possessed by the dark tyranny of this political faith, it is enough, indeed, to cast a pall of most chilling and cheerless blackness over the moral universe around. Who can be happy with such a night-mare idea perpetually brooding over his soul? Least of all men, the poet, the man of pure and tender heart, of loving sympathies with nature and his kind. And when, simultaneous with this pervading and perpetual cause of gloom and hopelessness, pressing upon such a heart from the murky atmosphere of the social world around it, are added individual griefs of blighted affections and disappointed aspirations with the moral retribution, like the death-sting of the firecircled scorpion, which is the inevitable reaction of the perversion of those passions which, when not angels to bless, become demons to torture-who can wonder that the result is an utter misanthropic despair and weariness of life, a consciousness of entire blight and failure of all the chances and hopes of this existence, and a wild yearning for a dreamless and unwaking repose in the grave?

But a truce to speculations which may perhaps after all be

purely fanciful. The brief space remaining at our command, we prefer to devote to some extracts from the volume itself. Its contents are very varied in subject and character. The imitations of the old English poetry, of different ages, are admirable; while nothing can exceed the wild, fiery energy of the heroic poems in which his object has been to "shadow forth something of the form and spirit of Norse poetry." Few of Burns's Scottish poems surpass the sweetness of "Jeanie Morrison ;" and, though far from uniform in merit, some of the songs are entitled to rank among the finest lyric poetry of the language. The greater number of the whole are of the mournful character referred to in the preceding remarks, and seem to fall on the ear and heart like the wailing chant or dirges on the solemn tolling of funeral knells. The following poem we extract, not merely for the sake of the heartbroken pathos that breathes through it, but for the illustration it affords to our remarks upon the unhappy circumstance above alluded to:

MY HEID IS LIKE TO REND, WILLIE.

I canna live as I ha'e lived,

Or be as I should be.

But fauld unto your heart, Willie,

The heart that still is thine,

And kiss ance mair the white, white cheek,
Ye said was red langsyne.

A stoun' gaes through my heid, Willie,
A sair stoun' through my heart, —

O! haud me up and let me kiss

Thy brow ere we twa pairt.

Anither, and anither yet!

How fast my life-strings break!

Fareweel! fareweel ! through yon kirk-yard

Step lichtly for my sake!

The lav'rock in the lift, Willie,

That lilts far ower our heid,

Will sing the morn as merrilie
Abune the clay-cauld deid;
And this green turf we're sittin' on,
Wi' dew-draps shimmerin' sheen,
Will hap the heart that luvit thee
As warld has seldom seen.

But O! remember me, Willie,

On land where'er ye be,

We were assured by the poet's friend that there was no more fiction in the preceding, than the supposed actual death of its subject. The connexion between it and the beautiful song entitled "The bloom hath left thy cheek, Mary," will be obvious to every reader. To complete the narrative of this sad history, taken from his own verse, we conclude with the following, which is added in the American, to the contents of the original edition having been written by Motherwell but a few days be

fore his death. We regret our want of space to make other quotations of a different character and less mournful tone. On its first publication some time after, in a newspaper, it was accompanied with a remark, that no slight interest had been excited in Glasgow, in noticing how the prophetic yearning of the dying poet for the memory of affection had been realized his grave having been observed to be haunted by the constant visits of a young female "pacing it round," and keeping still fresh the last memorials offered there of love and grief. But peace be with that grave,and for its occupant, the charity due to human error, the sympathy which is the sacred right of all sorrow and suffering, and the love and admiration which none can deny as the just meed of the genius of a true Poet.

LINES GIVEN TO A FRIEND A DAY OR TWO BEFORE THE

DECEASE OF THE WRITER.

October, 1835.

When I beneath the cold red earth am sleeping,

Life's fever o'er,

Will there for me be any bright eye weeping
That I'm no more?

Will there be any heart still memory keeping

Of heretofore?

When the great winds, through leafless forests rushing,
Sad music make;

When the swollen streams, o'er crag and gully gushing,
Like full hearts break,

Will there then one whose heart despair is crushing

Mourn for my sake?

When the bright sun upon that spot is shining

With purest ray,

And the small flowers, their buds and blossoms twining,

CHORUSES FROM THE GREEK TRAGÉDIES.

BY H. W. HERBERT, ESQ.

I.

CHORUS OF GREEK VIRGINS BEFORE THE SACRIFICE OF IPHIGENIA.

τίς ἄρ' ὑμέναιος διὰ λωτοῦ λίβυος. — Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis. -v. 1036.

STROPHE.

WHOSE were those bridal measures,

That through the Libyan flute so sweetly stole,
Blent with the soft lute's call to choral pleasures,
And the wild reed-pipe's liquid note,
Melting the soul?

When upon Pelion's top they gave to float
Their glittering love-locks on the breezy air,
The tuneful Muses fair,

Striking the ground with golden-sandalled feet,
While banqueted the gods in order meet,
All as they hymned, in songs divinely sweet,

66

'Bright Thetis Great Oacides,"

Till the old Centaurs' mount sent back the clang,
And that ancestral grove of loftiest trees,

As Peleus' hymenean rang!

While ever and anon that Dardan boy,

Jove's stolen joy,

Brimmed with the mantling nectar up
The womb of every golden cup,

The Phrygian Ganymede!

And on the silver-white sea-margins dancing,
In mazy circles deftly now advancing,

Retreating now with gleamy speed,
Forth swelled the fifty daughters of the sea
Their sister Nereid's marriage symphony.

ANTISTROPHE.

Forth with their pine-boughs glancing,

And leafy coronals on every brow,

From their deep glades and tangled thickets prancing,
Rushed the wild Centaurs' frantic route,

The steep hills down;

To feast with gods the jovial board about,

VOL. X.-No. XLIII.-4