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I cannot paint her-something I had seen
So pale and slim, and tawdry and unclean;
With haggard looks, of vice and woe the prey,
Laughing in languor, miserably gay:

Her face, where face appeared, was amply spread,
By art's warm pencil, with ill-chosen red,

The flower's fictitious bloom, the blushing of the dead:
But still the features were the same, and strange

My view of both-the sameness and the change,
That fixed me gazing, and my eye enchained,
Although so little of herself remained;

It is the creature whom I loved, and yet
Is far unlike her-would I could forget
The angel or her fall; the once adored

Or now despised! the worshipped or deplored!
"O! Rosabella!" I prepared to say,

"Whom I have loved;" but Prudence whispered, Nay,

And Folly grew ashamed-Discretion had her day.
She gave her hand; which, as I lightly pressed,
The cold but ardent grasp my soul oppressed;
The ruined girl disturbed me, and my eyes
Looked, I conceive, both sorrow and surprise.

If words had failed, a look explained their style; She could not blush assent, but she could smile: Good heaven! I thought, have I rejected fame, Credit, and wealth, for one who smiles at shame? She saw me thoughtful-saw it, as I guessed, With some concern, though nothing she expressed. "Come, my dear friend, discard that look of care," &c.

Thus spoke the siren in voluptuous style, While I stood gazing and perplexed the while, Chained by that voice, confounded by that smile. And then she sang, and changed from grave to gay, Till all reproach and anger died away.

"My Damon was the first to wake

The gentle flame that cannot die;
My Damon is the last to take

The faithful bosom's softest sigh:
The life between is nothing worth,

O cast it from thy thought away;
Think of the day that gave it birth,
And this its sweet returning day.
"Buried be all that has been done,

Or say that nought is done amiss;

For who the dangerous path can shun
In such bewildering world as this?
But love can every fault forgive,
Or with a tender look reprove;
And now let nought in memory live,
But that we meet, and that we love."

And then she moved my pity; for she wept,
And told her miseries, till resentment slept;
For, when she saw she could not reason blind,
She poured her heart's whole sorrows on my mind
With features graven on my soul, with sighs
Seen, but not heard, with soft imploring eyes,
And voice that needed not, but had, the aid
Of powerful words to soften and persuade.
"O! I repent me of the past;" &c.

Softened, I said, "Be mine the hand and heart,
If with your world you will consent to part."
She would-she tried.-Alas! she did not know
How deeply-rooted evil habits grow:

She felt the truth upon her spirits press,
But wanted ease, indulgence, show, excess,
Voluptuous banquets, pleasures-not refined,
But such as soothe to sleep the opposing mind-
She looked for idle vice, the time to kill,
And subtle, strong apologies for ill.
And thus her yielding, unresisting soul
Sank, and let sin confuse her and control:

Pleasures that brought disgust yet brought relief,
And minds she hated helped to war with grief.

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There came at length request

That I would see a wretch with grief oppressed,
By guilt affrighted—and I went to trace
Once more the vice-worn features of that face,
That sin-wrecked being! and I saw her laid
Where never worldly joy a visit paid:
That world receding fast! the world to come
Concealed in terror, ignorance, and gloom;
Sin, sorrow, and neglect; with not a spark
Of vital hope,-all horrible and dark.

It frightened me!-I thought, and shall not I
Thus feel?-thus fear?--this danger can I fly?
Do I so wisely live that I can calmly die?

Still as I went came other change the frame
And features wasted, and yet slowly came
The end; and so inaudible the breath;

And still the breathing, we exclaimed-"Tis death!
But death it was not: when indeed she died

I sat and his last gentle stroke espied :
When as it came-or did my fancy trace
That lively, lovely flushing o'er the face?

Bringing back all that my young heart impressed!
It came--and went!-She sighed, and was at rest!

From Moore, whose works are more, probably, than those of any of his contemporaries in the hands of all readers of poetry, we will make only one short extract. Here is the exquisitely beautiful description in the Fire Worshippers, the finest of the four tales composing Lalla Rookh, of the calm after a storm, in which the heroine, the gentle Hinda, awakens in the war-bark of her lover Hafed, the noble Gheber chief, into which she had been transferred from her own galley while she had swooned with terror from the tempest and the fight:—

How calm, how beautiful comes on
The stilly hour when storms are gone!
When warring winds have died away,
And clouds, beneath the dancing ray,
Melt off, and leave the land and sea
Sleeping in bright tranquillity--
Fresh as if day again were born,
Again upon the lap of morn!
When the light blossoms, rudely torn
And scattered at the whirlwind's will,
Hang floating in the pure air still,
Filling it all with precious balm,
In gratitude for this sweet calm :-
And every drop the thunder-showers
Have left upon the grass and flowers
Sparkles, as 'twere that lightning gem
Whose liquid flame is born of them!

When, 'stead of one unchanging brecze
There blow a thousand gentle airs,
And each a different perfume bears,-
As if the loveliest plants and trees
Had vassal breezes of their own,
To watch and wait on them alone,
And waft no other breath than theirs!
When the blue waters rise and fall,
In sleepy sunshine mantling all ;
And even that swell the tempest leaves
Is like the full and silent heaves

Of lovers' hearts when newly blest-
Too newly to be quite at rest!
Such was the golden hour that broke
Upon the world, when Hinda woke
From her long trance, and heard around
No motion but the water's sound
Rippling against the vessel's side,
As slow it mounted o'er the tide.-
But where is she?-her eyes are dark,
Are wildered still-is this the bark,
The same that from Harmozia's bay
Bore her at morn-whose bloody way
The sea-dog tracks?-No! strange and new
Is all that meets her wondering view
Upon a galliot's deck she lies,

Beneath no rich pavilion's shade,
No plumes to fan her sleeping eyes,
Nor jasmin on her pillow laid.
But the rude litter, roughly spread
With war-cloaks, is her homely bed,
And shawl and sash, on javelins hung,
For awning o'er her head are flung.
Shuddering she looked around-there lay
A group of warriors in the sun
Resting their limbs, as for that day
Their ministry of death were done;
Some gazing on the drowsy sea,
Lost in unconscious reverie;

And some, who seemed but ill to brook

That sluggish calm, with many a look
To the slack sail impatient cast,

As loose it flagged before the mast.

Crabbe, born in 1754, lived till 1832; Campbell, born in 1777, died in 1844; Moore, born in 1780, died in 1851.

BYRON.

Byron was the writer whose blaze of popularity it mainly was that threw Scott's name into the shade, and induced him to abandon verse. Yet the productions which had this effect-the Giaour, the Bride of Abydos, the Corsair, &c., published in 1813 and 1814 (for the new idolatry was scarcely kindled by the two respectable, but somewhat tame, cantos of Childe Harold, in quite another style, which appeared shortly before these effusions),

were, in reality, only poems written in what may be called a variation of Scott's own manner-Oriental lays and romances, Turkish Marmions and Ladies of the Lake. The novelty of scene and subject, the exaggerated tone of passion in the outlandish tales, and a certain trickery in the writing (for it will hardly now be called anything else), materially aided by the mysterious interest attaching to the personal history of the noble bard, who, whether he sung of Giaours, or Corsairs, or Laras, was always popularly believed to be "himself the great sublime he drew," wonderfully excited and intoxicated the public mind at first, and for a time made all other poetry seem spiritless and wearisome; but, if Byron had adhered to the style by which his fame was thus originally made, it probably would have proved transient enough. Few will now be found to assert that there is anything in these earlier poems of his comparable to the great passages in those of Scott-to the battle in Marmion, for instance, or the raising of the clansmen by the fiery cross in the Lady of the Lake, or many others that might be mentioned. But Byron's vigorous and elastic genius, although it had already tried various styles of poetry, was, in truth, as yet only preluding to its proper display. First, there had been the very small note of the Hours of Idleness; then, the sharper, but not more original or much more promising, strain of the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (a satirical attempt in all respects inferior to Gifford's Baviad and Mæviad, of which it was a slavish imitation); next, the certainly far higher and more matured, but still quiet and commonplace, manner of the first two cantos of Childe Harold; after that, suddenly the false glare and preternatural vehemence of these Oriental rhapsodies, which yet, however, with all their hollowness and extravagance, evinced infinitely more power than anything he had previously done, or rather were the only poetry he had yet produced that gave proof of any remarkable poetic genius. The Prisoner of Chillon and Parisina, The Siege of Corinth and Mazeppa, followed, all in a spirit of far more truth, and depth, and beauty than the other tales that had preceded them; but the highest forms of Byron's poetry must be sought for in the two concluding cantos of Childe Harold, and in what else he wrote in the last seven or eight years of his short life.

SHELLEY.

Yet the greatest poetical genius of this time, if it was not that of Coleridge, was, probably, that of Shelley.

Byron died in

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