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"The waves in silvery glances break,

Like a short and quickly rolling sea."-Id.

But we will not insist too strongly on such instances; for surely, to do this bard justice, his illustrations have generally any other fault, rather than that of too close resemblance.

If there be any beauty, however, that they have carried more especially beyond its bounds (for what kind of beauty have they left unattempted and unexhausted) it is that of an harmonious versification. It may be the defect of our uneducated ear but we confess that their verses are sometimes modulated to such dulcet melody, as is absolutely torturing. Take the following instances:

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It did seem the skies

Were o'er me pure as fancy--yet waves

Did rattle round my head, and fill mine ears
Like the measureless roar of the far fight."--Mellen.
"The general commands the officers with speed
To see his men drawn up and martialed;

Which being done, they wheel the ranks,

And kneeling down, to heaven all gave thanks."-- Wolcott. "And hailing, in the lonely chase, his devious mate,

With shoutings wild, beside Schoharie's brooks,

Or Canajohary's echoing cliffs,

First broke," &c.—M'Kinnon.

One poet there is, however, who knows how to break, with the happiest effect, the lulling sweetness of his rythm, by artfully interposed discords. He had felt, as he tells us, the monotony of the best heroic verse, and perceiving his own to be of that sort, judged it necessary to vary this too constant harmony, by introducing-a resource hitherto unemployed except in ludicrous verse-the double rhyme. It is thus that he distributes them.

"There, Mercy whispers in a balmy breath,
Here Anger thunders, and the note is death;
There, 't is a string that soothes with slow vibration,
And here, a burst that shakes the whole creation.
By heaven forwarn'd his hunted life to save,
Behold Elijah stands by Horeb's cave;

Grieved that the God, for whom he'd warmly striven,
Should see his servants into exile driven,
His words neglected, by those servants spoken,
His prophets murder'd and his altars broken.
His bleeding heart a soothing strain requires;
He hears it softer than Eolian lyres," &c.

Pierpont--"Airs of Palestine."

If they know so skilfully to move the affections, in these gentle ways, it must not be imagined that they have not an equal power to strike us with the sublime-to astound us with a terror or horror, such as poet never before reached. Of this, we dare give only a few examples, lest sensitive readers should recoil from our pages.

“The tender mother, with like woes opprest,
Beholds her infant frying at her breast,
Crying and looking on her as it fries;

Till death shuts up its heart affecting eyes."-Wolcott.

"Here lay the numerous bodies of the dead,
Some frying, others almost calcined."—Id.

"Where round the broiling babe, fresh from the womb."

Pres. Dwight.

The following seems to be a favourite figure in American verse and prose:

-"Fired with his theme, (says Mr. Knapp,) he sought the fountains for information." (Note-to kindle, not to put it out.)

"It is such questions as these that call up the fire, and not unfrequently cause to flow all the venom of party."-Id.

"all who share

In the pure streams that from its fountain flow;

We must be pure ourselves, if we would dare

Take of the holy fire that wells and gushes there.”—Percival.

"The town, its wealth, high battlements and spires,

Now sinketh, weltering in conjoining fires."--Wolcott.

"Not to Aonian spring, Parnassian mount,
Famed Helicon, nor Aganippe's fount,

For fancied fire, I aim the wonted flight.”—Maylem.

Judge Brackenridge, in a funeral oration, which Mr. Knapp prefers to that by Pericles, in Thucydides, gives us the following hint how to go down to posterity. It is perhaps borrowed from Pope's

"No crab more active in the dirty dance,

Downward to climb, and backward to advance."

"You, my brave countrymen, shall go down to posterity with exceeding honour; your fame shall ascend the stream of time."

After all these specimens, our reader will, of course, have conceived such an opinion of these poets, that it can no longer surprise him, if, urged by the consciousness of their powers, they should, with a true republican intrepidity, challenge com

parison with those usurping kings of English literature, who have lorded it too long over the rising ascendency of our freeborn letters. Thus Mr. John Cotton, in his elegy on Thomas Hooker, defies comparison with Dryden's epigram on Milton'Three poets, in three distant ages born.'

""Twas of Geneva's worthies said with wonder,
(Those worthies three,) Farel was wont to thunder;
Viret like rain on tender grass to shower,
But Calvin lively oracles to pour.

All these in Hooker's spirit did remain
A son of thunder, and a shower of rain;
A pourer forth of lively oracles,

In saving soul, the sum of miracles."

Bottom had said, 'a sucking dove.' here, as he has,

and I will roar you as gently an' it were Mr. Percival is little behind Shakspeare

"Thy earth-circled ocean's gentle roar."

Curran had uttered something of the following sort:-'The 'instant that he sets his foot upon British ground, his body 'bursts the measure of the chains around him,' &c.-' He 'stands forth redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled by the 'irresistible genius of universal emancipation.' How admirably does Governor Lincoln, in the following manner, dismount Mr. Curran's prose-on-horseback!

-"Our blest New-England's fruitful soil
Requires no culture by a servile toil;
No master's torturing lash offends the ear,
No slave is now, nor ever shall be here.
Whene'er he steps upon our sacred fields,
Their guardian genius an asylum yields,

His chains drop from him, and on reason's plan,
He claims the gift of God, the rights of man!"

Milton had described creation indifferently well; and it is also done not amiss in the book of Genesis. Mr. Percival, however, thinking that a little more politeness would not be unbecoming, changes the omnipotent command into a very mild request:

"The stars exult, as when the Eternal Sire

Said, 'Be there light,' and light sprung forth at his desire."

The law given at Sinai

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Through heaven's high court the trump eternal roars—
Lift up your heads, ye everlasting doors."-Judge Dawes,

Mr. George Lunt, undeterred either by the subject or by Byron, rushes into an enormous apostrophe to the oceanMr. Charles Sprague being wont to triumph over Pope and Johnson in prologue-writing, enters the lists with Gray, in what he calls a "Shakspeare Ode." Mr. Percival, now invites us, by a strictly parallel passage, to compare his with Milton's description of the gladness of the sailors, whom spicy winds salute, as they pass up the Arabian shores-and now he emulates the "St. Cecilia" of Dryden, and "the Passions" of Collins, in a Pindaric Ode, on the same subject, of which the beauties are so high and continuous, that we dare not separate them by citation. Occasionally, however, he descends, to the "less presumptuous car" of "Anacreontics" and "Horatians." A specimen of the latter we must give-for it is a perfect unique. He would seem, from the quotation prefixed, to intend nothing more than to surpass the ode to Melpomene.

HORATIAN.

"Quem tu Melpomene semel."-Horat. Od. 1. iv. 3.
"Fairest of all, bright Urania!

Who, on Helicon's top, sing to the golden stars,
When night draws all her curtains round,

And far over the hills shines the moon's mellow light;
First she gilds the tall mountain-top,

Then on glittering streams, and the wide spreading plain,

And the dark waves of the tossing sea,

Pours all her mellowest beams, till earth and ocean smile

Fairest of all, bright Urania!

Sing to thy golden-stringed lyre-sing the sweet song of heaven."

Another turns the Declaration of Independence into rhyme. The version, however, is not quite literal:

"Heard ye that sigh? It is the sigh of law,
The grand palladium of terrestrial right;

Lies crush'd by despotism's Typhœan paw,
And justice sinks to realms of brooding night;

Juries are driven before the rising storm,

And king-paid judges, judgment's gold-ruled bench deform."
George Richards--Declaration of Independence.

"New deeds of wrong and acts first penn'd in blood,
Howl, as wild furies, o'er the Atlantic flood."—Id.

But we have now inflicted upon our readers as much of this nonsense as we dare.

If, after all our citations, there should be any one tenacious enough of his reverence for names, with which the country is made to resound, to ask if they have no beauties-no ex

cellencies-we can only reply, that our specimens are the very cream of what others have chosen, for the purpose of giving a favourable opinion of these authors. As to extolling them, we have felt compelled to decide, that this was none of our business; and that it might very safely be left to the very skilful and zealous hands, that have, hitherto, done them such ample justice, for us,

"We come to bury Cæsar--not to praise him."

It only remains that we should justify the purpose of these, our labours, to those milder judges, who would extend a perpetual toleration to Dullness, however widely-prevailing. We cannot better defend ourselves, than in these words of Martinus Scriblerus:

"He lived in those days, when (after Providence had per'mitted the invention of printing, as a scourge for the sins of 'the learned) paper also became so cheap, and printers so nu'merous, that a deluge of authors covered the land; whereby 'not only the peace of the honest unwriting subject was daily 'molested, but unmerciful demands were made of his applause, 'yea of his money, by such as would neither carn the one, nor 'deserve the other."-Preface to the Dunciad.

ART. VIII.-Memoirs of the Life of Judge Jeffreys, sometime Lord Chancellor of England. By HUMPHREY W. WOOLRYCH. 8vo. London. 1827.

WE remember to have been told of a certain philanthrophical character, who so overflowed with the milk of human kindness, that he could hear no one abused, without speaking a word in his favour. To try how far his charity would go, a friend of his, one day, delivered a very bitter philippic against the Devil. Our philanthropist assented to every word. "I confess," said he, "that the Devil is, upon the whole, a bad fellow; he is the 'father of lies; he goes about like a roaring lion, seeking 'whom he may devour; he burns a great many people; but,' 'he continued, after a pause, "you must admit, that our friend 'Satan is a man of talents." Involuntarily we thought of this anecdote, in reading Mr. Woolrych's work; for his laboured

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