TO THE QUEEN OF MY HEART.

SHALL we roam, my love,

To the twilight grove,

When the moon is rising bright;

Oh, I'll whisper there,

In the cool night-air,

What I dare not in broad day-light!

I'll tell thee a part

Of the thoughts that start

To being when thou art nigh;

And thy beauty, more bright

Than the stars' soft light,

Shall seem as a weft from the sky.

When the pale moonbeam

On tower and stream

Sheds a flood of silver sheen,

How I love to gaze

As the cold ray strays

O'er thy face, my heart's throned queen!

Wilt thou roam with me

To the restless sea,

And linger upon the steep,

And list to the flow

Of the waves below

How they toss and roar and leap?

Those boiling waves

And the storm that raves

At night o'er their foaming crest,

Resemble the strife

That, from earliest life,

The passions have waged in my breast.

Oh, come then and rove

To the sea or the grove

When the moon is rising bright,

And I'll whisper there

In the cool night-air

What I dare not in broad day-light.

SIMILES.

As from an ancestral oak

Two empty ravens sound their clarion,

Yell by yell, and croak by croak,

When they scent the noonday smoke
Of fresh human carrion :-

As two gibbering night birds flit
From their bowers of deadly hue,

Through the night to frighten it,
When the morn is in a fit,

And the stars are none, or few :

As a shark and dog-fish wait

Under an Atlantic isle,

For the negro-ship, whose freight

Is the theme of their debate,

Wrinkling their red gills the while

Are ye, two vultures sick for battle,
Two scorpions under one wet stone,

Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle,
Two crows perched on the murrained cattle,

Two vipers tangled into one.

THE COLISEUM.

A FRAGMENT.*

AT the hour of noon, on the feast of the Passover, an old man, accompanied by a girl, apparently his daughter, entered the Coliseum at Rome. They immediately passed through the arena, and, seeking a solitary chasm among the arches of the southern part of the ruin, selected a fallen column for their seat, and, clasping each other's hands, sate in silent contemplation of the scene. But the eyes of the girl were fixed upon her father's lips his countenance, sublime and sweet, but motionless as some Praxitelian image of the greatest of poets, filled the air with smiles reflected from external forms.

It was the great feast of the Resurrection, and the whole native population, together with the foreigners, who flock from all parts of the earth to contemplate its celebration, were assembled round

* This is the fragment referred to in the Memoir, p. 51.