There would my gratefully uplifted eye

Survey the heavenly vault, by day,-by night,
When glows the firmament from pole to pole;
There would my overflowing heart exclaim,
The heavens declare the glory of the Lord,
The firmament shews forth his handy work!

The poet bidding farewell to the harmless bill," the "green wood, and the welkin song," thus commences his description of the birds of prey in the beginning of his third part.

The o'erfolding beak,

Incurvated; the clutching pounce; the eye,
Ferocious, keen, full orbed; the attitude
Erect; the skimming flight; the hovering poise;
The rapid sousing stroke ;-These now I sing.

We shall close our extracts from this poem by one more example, taken from the third part; and which is eminently beautiful; especially in the close, where the poet has introduced one of the most beautiful songs of the celebrated Burns. And he who can read the description of the wounded soldier and his mistress without emotion, can have little claim to feeling and sensibility.

Well does the raven love the sound of war.-
Amid those plains where Danube darkly rolls,
The theatres, on which the kingly play
Of war is oftenest acted, there the peal

Of cannon mouths, summons the sable flocks

To wait their death doomed prey; and they de

wait.

Yes, when the glittering columns, front to front
Drawn out, approach in deep and awful silence,
The raven's voice is heard hovering between.
Sometime upon the far deserted tents,
She boding sits and sings her fateful song.
But in the abandoned field she most delights,
When o'er the dead and dying slants the beam
Of peaceful morn, and wreaths of reeking mist
Rise from the gore dewed sward; from corpse to

corpse

She revels, far and wide; then, sated, flies

To some shot shivered branch, whereon she cleans Her purple beak.

Ah, who is he

At whose heart welling wound she drinks,
Glutting her thirst! He was a lovely youth;
Fair Scotia was his home, until his sire
To swollen monopoly resign'd, heart wrung,
The small demesne which his forefathers ploughed ;
Wide then dispersed the family of love.

One son betook him to the all friendly main :
Another, with his aged parents, plied

The sickly trade, in city garret pent;

Their youngest born,the drum and martial show,-
Deluded half, and half despairing,-joined ;
And soon he laid the food of bird and beast.
Long is his fate unknown; the horrid sum
Of dead is named, but sad suspense is left,
Enlabyrinthed in doubt, to please itself
With dark, misgiving hope. Ah, one there is,

Who fosters long the dying hope, that still
He may return. The live long summer day
She at the house end sits: and oft her wheel

Is stopt, while on the road, far stretched, she bends
A melancholy, eye-o'erflowing look;

Or strives to mould the distant traveller
Into the form of him who's far away.

Hopeless and broken hearted, still she loves

To sing, "When wild war's deadly blast is blown.”

FOR THE POLYANTHOS.

ANALECTA....No. II.

"Undique collatis membris."
BURNS.

BURNS was the true poet of nature. Unac quainted with the Greek or Roman writers, except through the medium of translation; he could neither purloin their beauties nor imitate their excellencies. His sentiments were the result of observation; and his descriptions copies from nature. Though his Scottish dialect to the eye of a foreigner may veil many of his beauties and excellencies, yet the beams of his genius still burst through the darkness and exhibit the fire of genuine poetry. He was, like the immortal Shakespeare, possessed of those keys which

"Can unlock the gates of Joy,

"Of Horrour and of thrilling fears,

"Or ope the sacred source of sympathetick tears."

For he can at will excite fear or horrour, joy or mirth, tenderness or pity. But he excels in the latter. And if ever poet excited in the sympathetick heart the glow of tenderness, or the melancholy emotions of grief-it is Burns.

Some of his poems are perhaps too local to give much entertainment. But they are genrally pleasing. He who can read his Tam O Shanter, his Cotter's Saturday Night, or his Mountain Daisy without emotions of lively pleasure, is rather to be pitied as wanting a sense that to be reasoned if he attempts to justify his insensibility by argument.

ICELAND.

THREE years after the discovery of this island, Gadar a Swede was driven on its eastern coast by a storm, where he passed the winter. The reports and exaggerated description of Gadar excited Flokka a noted pirate of Roga land in Norway, distinguished by birth and val our, to sail in quest of this new country. With this view he constructed a vessel; and, to assist him in directing his course, he resolved on the curious expedient of carrying with him some crows. Having sailed into the wide sea, he loosed one of his birds, which rising to a considerable height, directed his flight to the land

* It was discovered in 861 by a Norwegian pirate, and received from him the name of Sneeland.

Some

he had quitted; from which he concluded he was nearer to that than any other coast. time after a second crow was loosed, which having risen to excessive height without being able, as it was supposed, to discover land, returned on board the vessel. Flokka steered a steady course according to the best conjecture, till the third crow, having towered like the former, took a direct flight, which served him as a guidance to the eastern shores of Iceland. He navigated completely round the island, and from the accumulation of ice, which floated into the northern bays in the spring, he gave the country the name of Iceland, which it has ever since retained.

MISERIES OF LIFE.

WHAT relish can there be for enjoyment in this body; assailed by desire and wrath, by avarice and illusion, fear and sorrow, envy and hate, by absence from those we love, by union with those we dislike, by hunger and thirst, by disease and emaciation, by growth and decline, by old age and death.

We see this universe tending to decay, and even as these biting gnats and other insects; even as the grass of the field, and trees of the forest, which spring up and then perish.

Vast rivers have been dried, mountains torn up; the pole itself moved from its place; the whole earth deluged with water; and even the angels hurled from their stations.