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turn to England, about 1830. His collected works, of prose and verse, were pub lished in 1846, in two large volumes. Mr. LANDOR is a poet of great originality and power. But he is most favorably known now, as he will be by posterity, for his prose productions, which, written in pure nervous English, are full of thoughts that fasten themselves on the mind, and are "a joy forever." His "Imaginary Conversations," from which the preceding dialogue was selected, is a very valuable work. It is rich in scholarship; full of imagination, wit, and humor; cor rect, concise, and pure in style; various in interest, and universal in sympathy

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106. ODE TO ADVERSITY.

DAUGHTER of Jove, relentless power,

Thou tamer of the human breast,
Whose iron scourge and torturing hour
The bad affright, afflict the best!
Bound in thy adamantine chain,
The proud are taught to taste of pain;
And purple tyrants vainly groan

With pangs unfelt before, unpitied and alone.

When first thy sire to send on earth
Virtue, his darling child, design'd,
To thee he gave the heavenly birth,

And både to form her infant mind.

Stern, rugged nurse! thy rigid lore
With patience many a year she bore:
What sorrow was, thou băd'st her know,

And from her own she learn'd to melt at others' woe.

Scared at thy frown terrific, fly

Self-pleasing Folly's idle brood,

Wild Laughter, Noise, and thoughtless Joy,

And leave us leisure to be good.

Light they disperse, and with them go.

The summer friend, the flattering foe:

By vain Prosperity received,

To her they vow their truth, and are again believed.

Wisdom in sable garb array'd,

Immersed in rapturous thought profound,

And Melancholy, silent maid,

With leaden eye that loves the ground,

Still on thy solemn steps attend:

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Warm Charity, the general friend,
With Justice, to herself severe,

And Pity, dropping soft the sadly-pleasing tear.

Oh! gently on thy suppliant's head,

Dread goddess, lay thy chastening hand!
Not in thy Gorgon' terrors clad,

Nor circled with the vengeful band
(As by the im'pious thou art seen),
With thundering voice, and threatening mien,
With screaming Horror's funeral cry,

Despair, and fell Disease, and ghastly Poverty.

Thy form benign, O goddess, wear,
Thy milder influence impart;
Thy philosophic train be there.

To soften, not to wound, my heart.
The generous spark extinct revive;
Teach me to love, and to forgive;
Exact, my own defects to scan;

What others are, to feel; and know myself a man.

THOMAS GRAY

THOMAS GRAY, the son of a scrivener in London, was born there in 1716. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge. When his college education was completed, HORACE WALPOLE induced him to accompany him in a tour through France and Italy; but a misunderstanding taking place, GRAY returned to England in 1741. His father being dead, he went to Cambridge to take his degree in civil law, though he was possessed of sufficient means to enable him to dispense with the labor of his profession. He settled himself at Cambridge for the remainder of his days, only leaving home when he made tours to Wales, Scotland, and the lakes of Westmoreland, and when he passed three years in London for access to the library of the British Museum. His life thenceforth was that of a scholar. His "Ode to Eton College," published in 1747, attracted little notice; but the "Elegy in a Country Church-yard," which appeared in 1749, became at once, as it will always continue to be, one of the most popular of all poems. Most of his odes were written in the course of three years following 1753; and the publication of the collection in 1757 fully established his reputation. His poems, flowing from an intense, though not fertile imagination, inspired by the most delicate poetic feeling, and elaborated into exquisite terseness of diction, are among the most splendid ornaments of English literature. His

'GORGON the gorgons, in heathen mythology, were frightful beings, that had hissing serpents instead of hair upon their heads; and they had wings, brazen claws, and enormous teeth Their names were Stheno, EuryalE, and MEDUSA. The head of the latter was so frightful that every one who looked at it was changed into stone.

"Letters," published after his death, are admirable specimens of English style, full of quiet humor, astute, though fastidious criticism, and containing some of the most picturesque pieces of descriptive composition in the language. He became professor of modern history at Cambridge, in 1768. He died by a severe attack of the gout in 1771.

107. PARRHASIUS' AND THE CAPTIVE.

1. THERE stood an unsold captive in the mart,
A gray-hair'd and majestical old man,
Chain'd to a pillar. It was almost night,
And the last seller from his place had gone,
And not a sound was heard but of a dog
Crunching beneath the stall a refuse bone,
Or the dull echo from the pavement rung,
As the faint captive changed his weary feet.

2. He had stood there since morning, and had borne
From every eye in Ath'ens the cold gaze

Of curious scorn. The Jew had taunted him
For an Olynthian slave. The buyer came
And roughly struck his palm upon his breast,
And touch'd his unheal'd wounds, and with a sneer
Pass'd on; and when, with weariness o'erspent,
He bow'd his head in a forgetful sleep,

The inhuman soldier smote him, and, with threats
Of torture to his children, summon'd back
The ebbing blood into his pallid face.

3. 'Twas evening, and the half-descended sun
Tipp'd with a golden fire the many domes
Of Ath'ens, and a yellow atmosphere
Lay rich and dusky in the shaded street

Through which the captive gazed. He had borne up
With a stout heart that long and weary day,

Haughtily patient of his many wrongs;

"PARRHASIUS, a painter of Athens, among those Olynthian captivca Philip of Macedon brought home to sell, bought one very old man; and when he had him at his house, put him to death with extreme torture and torment, the better, by his example, to express the pains and passions of his Prometheus, whom he was then about to paint.—Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.

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But now he was alone, and from his nerves
The needless strength departed, and he lean'd
Prone on his massy chain, and let his thoughts
Throng on him as they would.

Unmark'd of him,
Parrhasius' at the nearest pillar stood,

Gazing upon his grief. The Athenian's cheek
Flush'd as he measured with a painter's eye
The moving picture. The abandon'd limbs,
Stain'd with the oozing blood, were laced with veins
Swollen to purple fullness; the gray hair,
Thin and disorder'd, hung about his eyes;
And as a thought of wilder bitterness
Rose in his memory, his lips grew white,
And the fast workings of his bloodless face
Told what a tooth of fire was at his heart.
5. The golden light into the painter's room
Stream'd richly, and the hidden colors stole
From the dark pictures radiantly forth,
And in the soft and dewy atmosphere
Like forms and landscapes magical they lay.
The walls were hung with armor, and about
In the dim corners stood the sculptured forms
Of Cytheris, and Dian,' and stern Jove,

'PARRHASIUS, a distinguished painter of antiquity, born about the year 460 B. C., was a native of Ephesus, though others say he was an Athenian, where he flourished in the time of SOCRATES, and was the rival of ZEUXIS. The latter painted grapes so naturally that birds came to pick them. PARRHASIUS having exhibited a piece, ZEUXIS said, "Remove your curtain that we may see your painting." The curtain was the painting. ZEUXIS acknowledged his defeat, saying, "ZEUXIs has deceived birds, but PARRHASIUS has deceived ZEUXIS." He was so excessively vain as to wear a crown of gold, and to carry a staff studded with gold nails, to indicate that he was the prince of painters.-' CYTHERIS, a celebrated courtesan, the mistress of Antony, and subsequently of the poet Gallus, who mentions her in his poems under the name of LYCORIS. DIANA (dì à' na), an ancient Italian divinity, whom the Romans identified with the Greek ARTEMIS. According to the most ancient accounts, she was the daughter of Jupiter and Leto, and the twin sister of Apollo.-Jove, Jupiter, the supreme deity of the Romans, called Zeus by the Greeks.

And from the casement soberly away

Fell the grotesque long shadows, full and true,
And, like a vail of filmy mellowness,
The lint-specks floated in the twilight air.
6. Parrhasius stood, gazing forgetfully

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Upon his canvas. There Prometheus' lay,

Chain'd to the cold rocks of Mount Caucasus-
The vulture at his vitals, and the links
Of the lame Lemnian festering in his flesh;
And, as the painter's mind felt through the dim,
Rapt mystery, and pluck'd the shadows forth
With its far-reaching fancy, and with form
And color clad them, his fine, earnest eye,
Flash'd with a passionate fire, and the quick curl
Of his thin nostril, and his quivering lip,

Were like the wing'd god's, breathing from his flight

"Bring me the captive now!

My hand feels skillful, and the shadows lift
From my waked spirit airily and swift,

And I could paint the bow

Upon the bended heavens-around me play
Colors of such divinity to-day.

"Ha! bind him on his back!

Look!—as Prometheus in my picture here!
Quick or he faints!-stand with the cordial near!
Now-bend him to the rack!

Press down the poison'd links into his flesh!
And tear agape that healing wound afresh!

"So-let him writhe! How long

Will he live thus? Quick, my good pencil, now!

'PROMETHEUS, in heathen mythology, was son of the Titan Sapetus and Clymene. His name signifies forethought. For offenses against JuPITER, he was chained to a rock on Mount Caucasus, where an eagle consumed in the daytime his liver, which was restored in each succeeding night. Lemnian, from Lemnos, now Stalimni, an island of the Greek Archipelago, where the lame Hephæstus, or Vulcan, the god of fire, is said to have fallen, when Jupiter hurled him down from heaven. Hence the workshop of the god is sometimes placed in this island.

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