They say that when Duke Guido saw them come,
He clasp'd his hands, and looking round the room,
Lost his old wits for ever. From the morrow

None saw him after.

But no more of sorrow.

On that same night those lovers silently
Were buried in one grave under a tree;
There, side by side, and hand in hand, they lay
In the green ground: and on fine nights in May
Young hearts betroth'd used to go there to pray.

TO THE GRASSHOPPER AND CRICKET.

Green little vaulter in the sunny grass,
Catching your heart up at the feel of June,
Sole voice that's heard amidst the lazy noon,
When even the bees lag at the summoning brass;
And you, warm little housekeeper, who class
With those who think the candles come too soon,
Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune
Nick the glad silent moments as they pass.
O sweet and tiny cousins, that belong,

One to the fields, the other to the hearth,

Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strong
At your clear hearts; and both seem given to earth
To sing in thoughtful ears this natural song,-

In doors and out, summer and winter,-mirth.

FLOWERS.

We are the sweet flowers,
Born of sunny showers,

(Think, whene'er you see us, what our beauty saith ;)
Utterance mute and bright,

Of some unknown delight,

We fill the air with pleasure by our simple breath;
All who see us love us,-

We befit all places;

Unto sorrow we give smiles, and unto graces, graces.
Mark our ways, how noiseless

All, and sweetly voiceless,

Though the March winds pipe, to make our passage clear;
Not a whisper tells

Where our small seed dwells,

Nor is known the moment green when our tips appear.
We thread the earth in silence,

In silence build our bowers,

729

And leaf by leaf in silence show, till we laugh a-top, sweet flowers.

THE AUTHOR IN PRISON.

I papered the walls with a trellis of roses; I had the ceiling colored with clouds and sky; the barred windows were screened with Venetian blinds; and when my bookcases were set up, with

their busts and flowers, and a pianoforte made its appearance, perhaps there was not a handsomer room on that side the water. I took a pleasure, when a stranger knocked at the door, to see him come in and stare about him. The surprise, on issuing from the borough and passing through the avenues of a jail, was dramatic. Charles Lamb declared there was no other such room except in a fairy tale. But I had another surprise, which was a garden. There was a little yard outside, railed off from another belonging to the neighboring ward. This yard I shut in with green palings, adorned it with a trellis, bordered it with a thick bed of earth from a nursery, and even contrived to have a grass plot. The earth I filled with flowers and young trees. There was an apple-treefrom which we managed to get a pudding the second year. As to my flowers, they were allowed to be perfect. A poet from Derbyshire (Mr. Moore) told me he had seen no such heart's-ease. I bought the "Parnaso Italiano" while in prison, and used often to think of a passage in it while looking at this miniature piece of horticulture:

To me thou'rt vineyard, field, and wood, and meadow."

Here I wrote and read in fine weather, sometimes under an awning. In autumn, my trellises were hung with scarlet runners, which added to the flowery investment. I used to shut my eyes in my arm-chair, and affect to think myself hundreds of miles off. But my triumph was in issuing forth of a morning. A wicket out of the garden led into the large one belonging to the prison. The latter was only for vegetables, but it contained a cherry-tree, which I twice saw in blossom.

THE POET'S MISSION.

It is with the poet's creations, as with nature's, great or small. Wherever truth and beauty, whatever their amount, can be worthily shaped into verse, and answer to some demand for it in our hearts, there poetry is to be found; whether in productions grand and beautiful as some great event, or some mighty, leafy solitude, or no bigger and more pretending than a sweet face or a bunch of violets; whether in Homer's epic or Gray's Elegy, in the enchanted gardens of Ariosto and Spenser, or the very pot-herbs of the Schoolmistress of Shenstone, the balms of the simplicity of a cottage. Not to know and feel this, is to be deficient in the universality of Nature herself, who is a poetess on the smallest as well as the largest scale, and who calls upon us to admire all her productions: not indeed with the same degree of admiration, but with no refusal of it, except to defect.

Milton has said that poetry, in comparison with science, is "simple, sensuous, and passionate." By simple, he means unperplexed and self-evident; by sensuous, genial and full of imagery; by passionate, excited and enthusiastic. I am aware that different constructions have been put on some of these words; but the context seems to me to necessitate those before us.

What the poet has to cultivate above all things is love and truth; what he has to avoid, like poison, is the fleeting and the false. He will get no good by proposing to be "in earnest at the moment." His earnestness must be innate and habitual; born with him, and felt to be his most precious inheritance. "I expect neither profit nor general fame by my writings," says Coleridge, in the Preface to his Poems; "and I consider myself as having been amply repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward;' it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.'

As to UTILITY, no man recognizes the worth of it more than the poet he only desires that the meaning of the term may not come short of its greatness, and exclude the noblest necessities of his fellow-creatures. He is quite as much pleased, for instance, with the facilities for rapid conveyance afforded him by the railroad, as the dullest confiner of its advantages to that single idea, or as the greatest two-idead man who varies that single idea with hugging himself on his "buttons" or his good dinner. But he sees also the beauty of the country through which he passes, of the towns, of the heavens, of the steam-engine itself, thundering and fuming along like a magic horse, of the affections that are carrying, perhaps, half the passengers on their journey, nay, of those of the great two-idead man; and, beyond all this, he discerns the incalculable amount of good, and knowledge, and refinement, and mutual consideration, which this wonderful invention is fitted to circulate over the globe, perhaps to the displacement of war itself, and certainly to the diffusion of millions of enjoyments.

"And a button-maker, after all, invented it!" cries our friend. Pardon me-it was a nobleman. A button-maker may be a very excellent, and a very poetical man, too, and yet not have been the first man visited by a sense of the gigantic powers of the combination of water and fire. It was a nobleman who first thought of this most poetical bit of science; it was a nobleman who first thought of it,-a captain who first tried it, and a button-maker who perfected it. And he who put the nobleman on such thoughts was the great philosopher Bacon, who said that poetry had "something divine in it," and was necessary to the satisfaction of the human

mind.

ALARIC WATTS.

FOR fastidiousness of taste and elaborateness of finish, few poets of the present century excel Alaric Watts; and he has written some pieces no less distinguished for true pathos. "He has given abundant proof," says Mr. Moir, "if not of high creative strength, of gentle pathos, of cultivated intellect, and an eye and ear sensitively alive to all the genial impulses of nature, of home-bred delights, and heartfelt happiness: he is always elegant and refined, and looks on carelessnessas every man of taste and accomplishment should-as a vice unworthy of an artist; for poetry, assuredly, requires the learned skill, intuitive as that may occasionally seem, as well as the teeming fancy."

Mr. Watts's publications are "Lyrics of the Heart, and other Poems;" "Poetical Album, Two Series," (a most judicious and tasteful selection of the fugitive poetry of living English poets ;) "Sketches," and "Scenes of Life, and Shades of Character," two volumes.

DEATH OF THE FIRST-BORN.

"Fare thee well, thou first and fairest."-BURNS.

My sweet one, my sweet one, the tears were in my eyes
When first I clasp'd thee to my heart, and heard thy feeble cries ;-
For I thought of all that I had borne, as I bent me down to kiss
Thy cherry lips and sunny brow, my first-born bud of bliss!

I turn'd to many a wither'd hope, to years of grief and pain,
And the cruel wrongs of a bitter world flash'd o'er my boding brain;—
I thought of friends grown worse than cold-of persecuting foes,
And I ask'd of Heaven if ills like these must mar thy youth's repose?

I gazed upon thy quiet face, half blinded by my tears,
Till gleams of bliss, unfelt before, came brightening on my fears:
Sweet rays of hope, that fairer shone mid the clouds of gloom that bound

them,

As stars dart down their loveliest light when midnight skies are round them.

My sweet one, my sweet one, thy life's brief hour is o'er,
And a father's anxious fears for thee can fever me no more!
And for the hopes, the sun-bright hopes that blossom'd at thy birth,—
They, too, have fled, to prove how frail are cherish'd things of earth!
Cradled in thy fair mother's arms, we watch'd thee, day by day,
Pale like the second bow of heaven-as gently waste away;
And, sick with dark foreboding fears we dared not breathe aloud,
Sat, hand in hand, in speechless grief, to wait death's coming cloud!

It came at length;-o'er thy bright blue eye the film was gathering fast,
And an awful shade pass'd o'er thy brow, the deepest and the last;
In thicker gushes strove thy breath,—we raised thy drooping head;
A moment more-the final pang-and thou wert of the dead!

Thy gentle mother turn'd away to hide her face from me,
And murmur'd low of Heaven's behests, and bliss attain'd by thee;-

She would have chid me that I mourn'd a doom so blest as thine,
Had not her own deep grief burst forth in tears as wild as mine!
We laid thee down in thy sinless rest, and from thine infant brow
Cull'd one soft lock of radiant hair, our only solace now;

Then placed around thy beauteous corse flowers not more fair and sweet,-
Twin rosebuds in thy little hands, and jasmine at thy feet.

Though other offspring still be ours, as fair perchance as thou,
With all the beauty of thy cheek, the sunshine of thy brow,—
They never can replace the bud our early fondness nursed;
They may be lovely and beloved, but not, like thee, the First!

The First! How many a memory bright that one sweet word can bring
Of hopes that blossom'd, droop'd, and died in life's delightful spring;
Of fervid feelings pass'd away-those early seeds of bliss
That germinate in hearts unsear'd by such a world as this!

My sweet one, my sweet one, my fairest and my first!

When I think of what thou might'st have been, my heart is like to burst;
But gleams of gladness through my gloom their soothing radiance dart,
And my sighs are hush'd, my tears are dried, when I turn to what thou art!

Pure as the snow-flake ere it falls and takes the stain of earth,
With not a taint of mortal life except thy mortal birth,
God bade thee early taste the spring for which so many thirst,
And bliss, eternal bliss is thine, my Fairest and my First!

TO A CHILD BLOWING BUBBLES.

Thrice happy babe! what radiant dreams are thine,
As thus thou bidd'st thine air-born bubbles soar;-
Who would not Wisdom's choicest gifts resign
To be, like thee, a careless child once more?

To share thy simple sports and sinless glee;
Thy breathless wonder, thy unfeign'd delight,
As, one by one, those sun-touch'd glories flee,
In swift succession, from thy straining sight;-
To feel a power within himself to make,

Like thee, a rainbow wheresoe'er he goes;
To dream of sunshine, and, like thee, to wake
To brighter visions, from his charm'd repose ;-

Who would not give his all of worldly lore,

The hard-earn'd fruits of many a toil and care,-
Might he but thus the faded past restore,

Thy guileless thoughts and blissful ignorance share!

Yet life hath bubbles, too, that soothe awhile

The sterner dreams of man's maturer years;
Love, Friendship, Fortune, Fame by turns beguile,
But melt 'neath Truth's Ithuriel touch to tears.

Thrice happy child! a brighter lot is thine;
What new illusion e'er can match the first?
We mourn to see each cherish'd hope decline;
Thy mirth is loudest when thy bubbles burst.