Perfect as thine, their bright existence teems
With beauty, in a paradise of beams;
Or, in some crystal world of water play*
A floating populace of insects gay;
And HE who bade exalted man to be
An image of his own eternity,
Alike to them a form and feature gives,
And not a mote but in His memʼry lives !—
REFLECTIONS AT NIGHT.
"Tis night; the holy, deep, delicious night!
Oh! pardon me, mild Elements ! whose wand
Of loveliness doth so becalm the world,
If Fancy hath awhile your scene forgot ;
Again a worshipper, my spirit bows
Before ye, panting for a mightier voice
Than Ecstacy, though all divinely toned.
Thou blue eternity of space! adorn'd
With radiant solitudes, how many eyes
Of spirits, who have ceased to walk the globe,
Imaginings from thee have caught, and gazed,
Until the soul amid yon azure wild
Seem'd wand'ring, as on seraph-music borne !
*The recent observations of Professor Ehringburgh have brought to light the existence of Monads which are not larger than the 24,000th part of an inch, and which are so thickly crowded in the fluid, as to leave intervals not greater than their own diameter. Hence he has made the computation, that each cubic line, which is nearly the bulk of a single drop, contains 500,000,000 of these Monads, a number which equals that of all the human beings existing on the surface of the globe.-Roget's Bridgewater Treatise, Vol. I. p. 13.
Mysterious hour! when most self-knowledge
And minutes are soft teachers whom the heart
Obeys!—and art thou not more deeply fill❜d
With inspiration from thy Maker sent,
Oh Earth! than in the day's tyrannic roar?
And if there be, as noblest minds allow,
A godlike moment, when pure spirits walk
This lower world, where man is doom'd to strive,
Tranquillity adores their presence now!—
GREAT Architect of worlds! whose wondrous
Presided o'er creation's natal hour, [power
Stamp'd man Thy miniature, and bade him run
A race of glory, till his goal be won;
When wan disease exhales her with'ring breath,
And dims his beauty with the damp of death;
At some still hour the holy sigh will swell,
The gushing tear of gratitude will tell
That Thou art by, to temper and to tame
The trembling anguish of the fever'd frame.
But oh! when heal'd by love and heaven, we rise, With radiant cheek, and re-illumin'd eyes, Bright as a new-born sun, all nature beams, And through the spirit darts immortal dreams! Now for the bracing hills, and healthful plains, And pensive ramble when the noontide wanes;
Now for the walk beside some haunted wood,
And fancy-music of a distant flood;
While far and wide, the wand'ring eye surveys,
And the heart pants to pour away its praise!
SCEPTRES are mighty wands, and few there be
With strength to wield them; yet, how many dare!
And kingdoms are the agonies of thrones,
Yet men will die to face them!-thus the heart
Exceeds itself, nor calls the madness vain.
But, were it mine, from kingliness to take
The tyrant witchery, I'd bid the young
Idolater of throne-exalted power,
In the deep midnight, when the world lies hush'd
In her humility of sleep, to stand and gaze
Upon a prince's couch. The glow and pomp
Of palace-chambers round him, mingling lie,
But on his cheek the royal spirit proves
A weariness, that mocks this outward show
Of kings,—a prison would have graced it more!~
A sad rehearsal of unhonour'd youth,
When years went reckless as the rolling waves,
Till passion grew satiety; a proud
Regret for trait'rous hearts, and that keen sense
Untold, which monarchs more than subjects feel
Of slavery; for servile is the pomp
Of kings, though gorgeously it dare the eye;
With a dim haunting of the dreary tomb,
That often through the banquet-splendor gapes,—
A darkness that defies a sun!-such dream
From out his slumber, that calm Beauty steals,
That Innocence delights to wear. Then watch
His features, till a deep'ning flush of soul
Array them with a spirit eloquence,
That speaks of Judgment! in her cloudy blaze
Of terror; monarchs cited, and the vast
Accompt of sceptred kingdoms render'd up;—
Did ENVY listen to his waking groan,
poor, how perilous, the state of kings!
RECOLLECTIONS OF BYRON AT HARROW
SCHOOL.
ON Harrow, when the heaven of June
Was garmented with glowing noon,
And not a cloud's minutest braid
Along its liquid sapphire stray'd,
I stood beneath that haunted tree,
And heard the leaf-toned melody
Which oft in boyhood's dreaming years
Had warbled on the pensive ears
Of Byron,-when he loved to muse
Beneath the quiet churchyard yews.
Oh! who in such an hour could stand,
And look adown the sloping land,
Where meadow, vale, and roving stream,
So often charm'd his chequer'd dream;
And round him feel the fresh-wing'd air
That lifted oft his waving hair;
And press the same sepulchral stone
His pressure loved to make its own,-
Nor feel a sense of fame and might,
That shook the heart with strange delight!
'Twas here he feasted fancy's power,
And in the mind's prophetic hour
Would try with telescopic gaze
To read the brow of unborn days,
Hail the bright orb of future fame,
And glory in a minstrel's name!
Or dared with dreadless eye to see
A map of vision'd misery,
In lines of awful length outspread,-
Till darkness veil'd him with the dead!
BRIGHT as the morning of primeval day
Burst on the waters of chaotic gloom,
Came revelation on the darksome world!-
Then error vanish'd in celestial truth,
Hush'd were the oracles, and quench'd the fires
That savage bigotry for ages fed:
New light, new order, new existence rose!
The pangs of woe, the wrongs of patient worth, Were now no more, as once their truth had been: Eternity would pay the debt of time,
The soul redeem, and justify her God.
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