But answers it as He deems best, I, therefore, would not breathe for thee To all the things of time; That blessing which true riches brings, In prosperous hours your hearts to guard, So shall you own, in grateful mood, BRUCE AND THE SPIDER. For Scotland's and for freedom's right In five successive fields of fight A hut's lone shelter sought. And cheerless was that resting-place His canopy, devoid of grace, The rude, rough beams alone; Through darksome night till dawn of day, The sun rose brightly, and its gleam And tinged with light each shapeless beam When, looking up with wistful eye, His filmy thread to fling From beam to beam of that rude cot; Six times his gossamery thread Each aim appear'd, and back recoil'd And soon the Bruce, with eager eye, One effort more, his seventh and last! And on the wish'd-for beam hung fast TO THE SKYLARK. Bird of the free and fearless wing, Songster of sky and cloud! to thee Hath Heaven a joyous lot assign'd; To spring where light and life have birth. Bird of the sweet and taintless hour, Ere yet upon the bending flower Thou, with an instinct half divine, Up toward a yet more glorious shrine. Bird of the morn! from thee might man, Creation's lord, a lesson take: If thou, whose instinct ill may scan The glories that around thee break, Bird of the happy, heavenward song! His soul, upborne on wings as strong As thought can give, from earth might start, And with a far diviner art Than ever genius can supply, As thou the ear, might glad the heart, SONNET-TO HIS WIFE. The butterfly, which sports on gaudy wing; The sunflower, in broad daylight glistening; And glittering through her bright but useless day, "Flaunts, and goes down a disregarded thing!" Thy emblem, Lucy, is the busy bee, Whose industry for future hours provides; TO A GRANDMOTHER. "Old age is dark and unlovely."-OSSIAN. Oh say not so! A bright old age is thine, At aught of which the hand of God bereaves, 502 May such a quiet thankful close be mine! And those grand-children, sporting round thy knee, As one who claims their fond allegiance still.' TO THE FRIENDS OF THE ANTI-SLAVERY CAUSE IN "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." Soul-stirring text! Proclaim it far and wide, The fame of freedom, by its influence fann'd, But oh what heavier or more hopeless doom Or fling upon their fame a fouler blot, Withering their spirits by its chilling gloom, Than one which leaves for doubt too fearful room, EBENEZER ELLIOTT, 1781-1849. EBENEZER ELLIOTT, the celebrated "Corn-Law Rhymer," was born on the 17th He is of March, 1781, at Masborough, near Rotherham, in Yorkshire, where his father was a commercial clerk in the iron-works, with a salary of £70 a year. said to have been very dull in his early years, and he was so oppressed with a sense of his own deficiencies compared with his bright brother, Giles, that he often wept bitterly. Yet who now knows Giles, except as being the brother of Ebenezer?-a lesson to parents, who may have a child that seems dull when young, not to despair of him. When he came dirty from the foundry, and saw Giles at the counting-house duties, or showing his drawings, or reading aloud to He an admiring circle, Ebenezer's only resource was solitude. Labor, however, and the honor paid to his brother, at length led him to make one effort more. chanced to see in the hand of a cousin "Sowerby's English Botany," and was delighted with its beautiful colored plates, which, his aunt showed him, might be copied by holding them before a pane of glass. Dunce though he seemed, he found he could draw, and that with great ease; and he soon became quite an en thusiastic botanist. "The spark smouldering in his mental constitution had been kindled. Thomson's Seasons,' which he heard his wondrous brother Giles read, who was beautiful as an angel, while he was ugliness itself,' gave him the first hint of the eternal alliance between poetry and nature; and, in fine, the smitten rock opened, and the Rhymer rhymed!" His next favorite author was Milton, who slowly gave way to Shakspeare. But, as he became a poet, he grew more and more ashamed of his deficiencies, and applied himself with great assiduity, every leisure moment he had, to remedy them. But how much leisure he had, and under what great disadvantages he labored, may be gathered from the following account which he gives of himself: "From my sixteenth to my twenty-third year, I worked for my father at Masbro' as laboriously as any servant he had, and without wages, except an occasional shilling or two for pocket-money, weighing every morning all the unfinished castings as they were made, and afterward in their finished state, besides opening and closing the shop in Rotherham, when my brother happened to be ill or absent." Elliott entered into business at Rotherham, but was unsuccessful, and, in 1821, he removed to Sheffield, and made a second start in life as an iron-monger, on a capital of £100, which he borrowed. He applied the whole strength of his mind to his business, and was eminently successful, and, after years of hard labor, he had acquired quite a competency, and built himself a good house in the suburbs of Sheffield. When the great commercial revulsions took place in 1837 and 1838, he lost, as he says, full one-third of his savings; but, in his own words, "I got out of the fracas with about £6000, which I will try to keep." His first publication was "The Vernal Walk," in his seventeenth year. This was followed by "Night," which was severely criticised by the "Monthly Review" and the "Monthly Magazine." But this had no effect to damp his spirits; on the contrary, it nerved his pen for higher flights, and soon another volume appeared, with a preface of defiance to the critics. It had no success, though Southey prophetically consoled the poet by writing: "There is power in the least of these tales, but the higher you pitch your tune the better you succeed. Thirty years ago they would have made your reputation; thirty years hence the world will wonder they did not do so." But it was the commercial distresses of 1837 and 1838 that called out the strong native talent of our poet. The cry for "cheap bread" rung from one end to the other of the land. Elliott took his decided stand for the repeal of the corn-laws, and poured forth his "Corn-Law Rhymes," that did more than any other one thing to stir the heart and rouse the energies of the people against monopoly, and he had the satisfaction, in a few years, to see the great object of the "Corn-Law League" fully attained, and free trade in bread-stuffs completely established. In 1841, he retired from business and from active interference in politics, to spend his last years at Great Houghton, near Barnsley, where he built a house upon a small estate of his own. After this he wrote and published very little. He had been troubled for many years with a disease of an asthmatic character, which so increased upon him as to be considered dangerous, and he finally died on the 1st of December, 1819. |