sion of which he declares would be more than an adequate reward for the rarest virtue, to the remark, "Surely, he who has described it so well must have possessed it?" replies, "If he were worthy to have possessed it, and had believingly anticipated and not found it, how bitter the disappointment!" and then, after a pause, breaks out into verse thus :— Yes, yes! that boon, life's richest treat, The fancy made him glad! Crown of his cup, and garnish of his dish, When his young heart first yearned for sympathy! But e'en the meteor offspring of the brain Unnourished wane; Faith asks her daily bread, And fancy must be fed. Now so it chanced-from wet or dry, Then came a restless state, 'twixt yea and nay, That boon, which but to have possest Doubts tossed him to and fro :. That cling and huddle from the cold Those sparkling colours, once his boast, Thin, and hueless as a ghost, Poor fancy on her sick-bed lay; O bliss of blissful hours! The boon of heaven's decreeing, While yet in Eden's bowers Dwelt the first husband and his sinless mate! If this were ever his, in outward being, Yet, lady, deem him not unblest; The certainty that struck hope dead Hath left contentment in her stead: And that is next to best! And still finer, we think, than anything we have yet given, is the following, entitled Patience, in Education :' 6 Love, Hope, and O'er wayward childhood would'st thou hold firm rule, And sun thee in the light of happy faces; Love, Hope, and Patience, these must be thy graces, But Love is subtle, and doth proof derive Yet haply there will come a weary day, When overtasked at length Both Love and Hope beneath the load give way. SOUTHEY. Coleridge died in 1834; his friend Southey, born three years later, survived to 1843. If Coleridge wrote too little poetry, Southey may be said to have written too much and too rapidly. Southey, as well as Coleridge, has been popularly reckoned one of the Lake poets; but it is difficult to assign any meaning to that name which should entitle it to comprehend either the one or the other. Southey, indeed, was, in the commencement of his career, the associate of Wordsworth and Coleridge; a portion of his first poem, his 'Joan of Arc,' published in 1796, was written by Coleridge; and he afterwards took up his residence, as well as Wordsworth, among the lakes of Westmoreland. But, although in his first volume of minor poems, published in 1797, there was something of the same simplicity or plainness of style, and choice of subjects from humble life, by which Wordsworth sought to distinguish himself about the same time, the manner of the one writer bore only a very superficial resemblance to that of the other; whatever it was, whether something quite original, or only, in the main, an inspiration caught from the Germans, that gave its peculiar character to Wordsworth's poetry, it was wanting in Southey's; he was evidently, with all his ingenuity and fertility, and notwithstanding an ambition of originality which led him to be continually seeking after strange models, from Arabian and Hindoo mythologies to Latin hexameters, of a genius radically imitative, and not qualified to put forth its strength except while moving in a beaten track and under the guidance of long established rules. Southey was by nature a conservative in literature as well as in politics, and the eccentricity of his Thalabas' and Kehamas' was as merely spasmodic as the Jacobinism of his ' Wat Tyler.' But even' Thalaba' and 'Kehama,' whatever they may be, are surely not poems of the Lake school. And in most of his other poems, especially in his last epic, Roderick, the Last of the Goths,' Southey is in verse what he always was in prose, one of the most thoroughly and unaffectedly English of our modern writers. The verse, however, is too like prose to be poetry of a very high order; it is flowing and eloquent, but has little of the distinctive life or lustre of poetical composition. There is much splendour and 6 beauty, however, in the Curse of Kehama,' the most elaborate of his long poems. As a specimen we will transcribe from the beginning of the Seventh Book or Canto the description of the voyage of the heroine, the lovely and virtuous Kailyal, through the air to the Swerga, or lowest heaven, with her preserver the Glendoveer, or pure spirit, Ereenia :— Then in the ship of heaven Ereenia laid The waking, wondering maid; The ship of heaven, instinct with thought, displayed On either side, in wavy tide, The clouds of morn along its path divide; Requires to voyage o'er the obedient sky. How swift she feels not, though the swiftest wind Motionless as a sleeping babe she lay, |