ΤΟ

gentle and unassuming. She is endeared too by a more than sisterly devotion, which paused only at his grave, to one of the most winning writers in the language,

[The following is one of the poems by Mr. Southey, whose intellectual efforts were probably best encouraged by her who cheered the loneliness of his hearth.

which are referred to:

LINES

SUGGESTED BY A PICTURE OF TWO FEMALES
BY LEONARDO DA VINCI.

Note 4, p. 368.
"Lines on a Portrait."

"ON MY OWN MINIATURE PICTURE

TAKEN AT TWO YEARS OF AGE.
"And I was once like this? that glowing cheek
Was mine, those pleasure-sparkling eyes; that brow
Smooth as the level lako, when not a breeze
Dies o'er the sleeping surface!-Twenty years
Have wrought strange alteration! Of the friends
Who once so dearly prized this miniature,
And loved it for its likeness, some are gone
To their last home; and some estranged in heart,
Beholding me, with quick averted glance
Pass on the other side! But still these hues
Remain unaltered, and these features wear
The look of Infancy and Innocence.

I search myself in vain, and find no trace
Of what I was: those lightly arching lines
Dark and o'erhanging now; and that sweet face
Settled in these strong lineaments!-There were
Who formed high hopes and flattering ones of thee,
Young Robert! for thine eye was quick to speak
Each opening feeling: should they not have known,
If the rich rainbow on the morning cloud
Reflects its radiant dyes, the husbandman
Beholds the ominous glory, and foresees
Impending storms! - They augured happily,
That thou didst love each wild and wond'rous tale
Of faery fiction, and thine infant tongue

Lisped with delight the godlike deeds of Greeco
And rising Rome; therefore they deemed, forsooth,
That thou should'st tread PREFERMENT's pleasant path.
Ill-judging ones! they let thy little feet
Stray in the pleasant paths of POESY,

And when thou shouldst have prest amid the crowd,
There didst thou love to linger out the day,
Loitering beneath the laurel's barren shade.
SPIRIT OF SPENSER! was the wanderer wrong?-1796."
SOUTHEY'S Poetical Works.

"The Lady Blanch, regardless of all her lovers' fears.
To the Urs'line Convent hastens, and long the Abbe's hears,
"() Blanch, my child, repent ye of the courtly life yo lead.”
Blanch looked on a rose-bud and little seemed to heed
She looked on the rose-bud, she looked round, and thought
On all her heart had whispered, and all the Nun had taught,
"I am worshipped by lovers, and brightly shines my fame
"All Christendom resoundeth the noble Blanch's name.
"Nor shall I quickly wither like the rose-bud from the tree,
"My queen-like graces shining when my beauty's gone from me.
"But when the sculptured marble is raised o'er my head,
"And the matchless Blanch lies lifeless among the noble dead,

18

This saintly lady Abbess hath made me justly fear,

"It nothing will avail me that I were worshipped here." Poetical Works of Charles Lamb.-H. R.]

MARY LAMB:

Note 5, p. 425.

"Ode to Duty.”

"The genial sense of Youth :"

[-"diffidence or veneration. Such virtues are the sacred attributes of Youth: its appropriate calling is not to distinguish in the fear of being deceived or degraded, not to analyze with scrupulous minuteness, but to accumulate in genial confidence; its instinct, its safety, its benefit, its glory, is to love, to admire, to feel, and to labour. " COLERIDGE: The Friend,' Vol. III. p. 62. — H. R.]

Note 6, p. 426. "Ode to Duty.

"And in the light of truth thy Bondman let me live!"

I cannot deny myself the gratification of introducing into this group of poems suggested by paintings another, also from the pen of one of Mr. Wordsworth's friends one, to whom I am confident he would delight in seeing any tribute paid in connection with his own writings. I have therefore less hesitation in in-law of moral to physical natures, and having contem

[“A living Teacher, to be spoken of with gratitude as of a benefactor, having, in his character of philosophical Poet, thought of morality as implying in its essence voluntary obedience, and producing the effect of order, transfers, in the transport of imagination, the

plated, through the medium of that order, all modes of existence as subservient to one spirit, concludes his address to the power of Duty in the following words:

serting here the following lines by Mary Lamb, included among the poems of her brother, the late Charles Lamb, and at the same time of using these pages to express a grateful admiration of an individual who has exhibited one of the most beautiful examples of the delicacy of female authorship to be met with in the records of English literature. In a few unambitious poems mingled among her brother's—as indeed her very existence seems to have been blended with his-and in that most graceful children's classic, 'Mrs. Leicester's School', there are tokens of a spirit as lofty in its purity as it is 3 E

To humbler functions, awful Power!
I call thee: I myself commend
Unto thy guidance from this hour;
Oh, let my weakness have an end!
Give unto me, made lowly wise
The spirit of self-sacrifice;

The confidence of reason give!

And in the light of Truth thy Bondman let me live !”—W. W

COLERIDGE: The Friend,' Vol. III. p. 64. H. R.]

•

37

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS.

Or, pilgrim-like, on forest moss reclined,
Gives plaintive ditties to the heedless wind,
Or listens to its play among the boughs
Above her head and so forgets her vows
If such a visitant of earth there be
And she would deign this day to smile on me
And aid my verse, content with local bounds
Of natural beauty and life's daily rounds,
Thoughts, chances, sights, or doings, which we tell
Without reserve to those whom we love well-

Then, haply, Beaumont! words in current clear
Will flow, and on a welcome page appear
Duly before thy sight, unless they perish here.

EPISTLE

TO SIR GEORGE HOWLAND BEAUMONT, BART.
FROM THE SOUTH-WEST COAST OF CUMBERLAND.-1811.

FAR from our home by Grasmere's quiet lake,
From the vale's peace which all her fields partake,
Here on the bleakest point of Cumbria's shore
We sojourn stunned by Ocean's ceaseless roar;
While, day by day, grim neighbour! huge Black Comb
Frowns, deepening visibly his native gloom,
Unless, perchance rejecting in despite

What on the plain we have of warmth and light,
In his own storms he hides himself from sight.
Rough is the time; and thoughts, that would be free
From heaviness, oft fly, dear friend, to thee;
Turn from a spot where neither sheltered road
Nor hedge-row screen invites my steps abroad;
Where one poor plane-tree, having as it might
Attained a stature twice a tall man's height,
Hopeless of further growth, and brown and sere
Through half the summer, stands with top cut sheer,
Like an unshifting weathercock which proves
How cold the quarter that the wind best loves,
Or like a centinel that, evermore
Darkening the window, ill defends the door
Of this unfinished house - - a fortress bare,
Where strength has been the builder's only care,
Whose rugged walls may still for years demand
The final polish of the plasterer's hand.

What shall I treat of? News from Mona's Isle?
Such have we, but unvaried in its style;
No tales of runagates fresh landed, whence
And wherefore fugitive or on what pretence;
Of feasts, or scandal, eddying like the wind
Most restlessly alive when most confined.
Ask not of me whose tongue can best appease
The mighty tumults of the House of Keys;
The last year's cup whose ram or heifer gained,
What slopes are planted, or what mosses drained:
An eye of fancy only can I cast

On that proud pageant now at hand or past,
When full five hundred boats in trim array,
With nets and sails outspread and streamers gay,
And chanted hymns and stiller voice of prayer,
For the old Manx-harvest to the deep repair,

-This dwelling's inmate more than three weeks' space Soon as the herring-shoals at distance shine

Like beds of moonlight shifting on the brine.

And oft a prisoner in the cheerless place,
I-of whose touch the fiddle would complain,
Whose breath would labour at the flute in vain,
In music all unversed, nor blessed with skill

A bridge to copy, or to paint a mill,
Tired of my books, a scanty company!
And tired of listening to the boisterous sea-
Pace between door and window muttering rhyme,
An old resource to cheat a froward time!
Though these dull hours (mine is it, or their shame!)
Would tempt me to renounce that humble aim.
-But if there be a Muse who, free to take
Her seat upon Olympus, doth forsake
Those heights (like Phoebus when his golden locks
He veiled, attendant on Thessalian flocks)
And, in disguise, a milkmaid with her pail
Trips down the pathways of some winding dale;
Or, like a Mermaid, warbles on the shores
To fishers mending nets beside their doors;

Mona from our abode is daily seen,

But with a wilderness of waves between;
And by conjecture only can we speak
Of aught transacted there in bay or creek;
No tidings reach us thence from town or field,
Only faint news her mountain sunbeams yield,
And some we gather from the misty air,

And some the hovering clouds, our telegraph, declare
But these poetic mysteries I withhold;

For Fancy hath her fits both hot and cold,
And should the colder fit with you be on
When you might read, my credit would be gone.