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And night by night 'tis thy delight, thy glory day by day, Through sable sea and breaker white, the giant game to play;

But, shamer of our little sports! forgive the name I gave, A fisher's joy is to destroy-thine office is to save.

O, lodger in the sea-king's halls, couldst thou but understand

Whose be the white bones by thy side, or who that dripping band,

Slow swaying in the heaving wave, that round about thee bend,

With sounds like breakers in a dream, blessing their ancient friend

Oh, couldst thou know what heroes glide with larger steps round thee,

Thine iron side would swell with pride, thou'dst leap within the sea!

Give honour to their memories who left the pleasant

strand,

To shed their blood so freely for the love of FatherlandWho left their chance of quiet age and grassy churchyard

grave

So freely, for a restless bed amid the tossing wave—

Oh, though our Anchor may not be all I have fondly

sung,

Honour him for their memory, whose bones he goes

among!

BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE.

THE SLEEPER.

BABY mine-thou sleepest
In thy long white shroud,
While thy mother keepest
Watch the while, and weepest
Low awhile, till memories crowd,

And her grief will cry aloud;
Yet thou stirrest ne'er the more,
Still thou sleepest as before.

Thy father, he returneth,
My babe, what shall I say?
Look up! thy father mourneth
His absence, while he burneth
To sport him in thine infant play;
Wake, baby mine; this voiceless clay
I cannot offer him for thee,

The babe he left so full of glee!

"Where hast thou laid my darling one, My beautiful?" he'll cry,

"Where hath our gentle angel gone?"
How can I see him thus, alone?
I dare not meet thy father's eye;
O death! I loved too trustfully!
O life! I knew not of love's store,
I thought not I could love thee more!

Wake up! this is not death!

Thou wert so full of glee,

I cannot think, for all it saith,

Such love can hang upon a breath:

Thou art too beautiful to be

By ruthless spoiler snatched from me!
Thy father cometh! wake, my child!
Look as when last on him thou smiled.

Vain, vain deceit of grief!

Thou wilt no more revive;
Vain show of unbelief,

Vain hope, too blind and brief!
Come, my beloved, look our last,
The bitterness of death is past;
Thou wak'st again no more to me,
But I, my babe, shall wake with thee.

ANONYMOUS.

PART II-POETS OF THE RESTORATION.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES.

WE have placed at the head of the Modern School of Poets, Cowper and Burns, two extremely different writers, yet both of whom have exercised an influence on modern poetry such as can be ascribed to no other poets of recent times. Each of them struck out an entirely new path for himself, abandoning the formal and extremely artificial school of their own age, not in obedience to any purposed change, but by a fine poetical instinct, and the dictates of a vigorous originality of genius which admitted of no other model but nature. Such distinctions are better fitted for regulating a systematic classification of the British poets than any mere chronological subdivision into centuries. That was essentially the beginning of a new era, and, consequently, the close of the one which had preceded it. To this latter we have now to direct our attention. The poets belonging to it may be fitly enough designated the Poets of the Restoration, though including the entire school down to the middle of the eighteenth century, because the whole of them were more or less affected by that artificial and courtly style of thought and expression introduced by the wits of the Court of Charles II., and which was only finally superseded by a higher

influence, when the strong natural genius of Burns, and the vigorous and finely toned satire of Cowper, returned the British poets directly to nature as their school. The poets of the seventeenth century and of the earlier part of the eighteenth century, though including men of great genius, form a far inferior class to those of the Elizabethan era, whom they succeeded, and cannot, we conceive, be compared to their successors, who compose our modern school. Poetry was with nearly all of them an art, in which they aimed far more at displaying the ingenuity of the artificer than the inspired reflections of nature as mirrored in the poet's own soul; and in this they were so far true to the vocation of the poet, who is not only the teacher of his age, but the reflex of its spirit, and the impersonater of its thoughts:

"Who clothes the spiritual in visible sense."

SIR JOHN DENHAM.

BORN, 1615; DIED, 1668.

SIR JOHN DENHAM was born in Dublin, where his father, an English lawyer of good family, then filled the office of Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer. Two years after the birth of the poet, his father was transferred to a more lucrative legal post in England, and removed with his family to London, where the early years of Denham were spent, till he entered Trinity College, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner, in 1631. From thence he removed, as a student of the law, to Lincoln's Inn, London. The reputation acquired by the poet, as the fruits of his study, is only too characteristic of the age. He was esteemed " as

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