Ca'm as a voyager to some distant land,
Aard full of wonder, full of hope as he.
The deadly germs of languor and disease
Ded in the human frame, and purity
Best with all gifts her earthly worshippers.
How vigorous then the athätie form of age!
How clear its open and unwrinkled brow!
Where neither avarice earning, pride, nor care,
Had stamped the seal of grey deformaty
On all the ming ing lineaments of time.
How lovely the intrepid front of youth!
Which meek-eyed eourage decked with freshest
Courage of soul, that dreaded not a name, [grace;
And elevated will, that journeyed on

Through life's phantasmal scene in fearlessness,
With virtue, love, and pleasure, hand in hand.
Then, that sweet bondage which is freedom's self,
And rivets with sensation's softest tie
The kindred sympathies of human souls,
Needed no fetters of tyrannie law.
Those delicate and timid impulses
In nature's primal modesty arose,
And with undoubting confidence disclosed
The growing longings of its dawning love,
Unchecked by dull and selfish chastity,
That virtue of the cheaply virtuous,
Who pride themselves in senselessness and frost.
No longer prostitution's venomed bane
Poisoned the springs of happiness and life;
Woman and man, in confidence and love,
Equal and free and pure, together trod
The mountain-paths of virtue, which no more
Were stained with blood from many a pilgrim's feet.

Then, where, through distant ages, long in pride
The palace of the monarch-slave had mocked
Famine's faint groan, and penury's silent tear,
A heap of crumbling ruins stood, and threw
Year after year their stones upon the field,
Wakening a lonely echo; and the leaves
Of the old thorn, that on the topmost tower
Usurped the royal ensign's grandeur, shook
In the stern storm that swayed the topmost tower,
And whispered strange tales in the whirlwind's ear.
Low through the lone cathedral's roofless aisles
The melancholy winds a death-dirge sung:
It were a sight of awfulness to see
The works of faith and slavery, so vast,
So sumptuous, yet so perishing withal!
Even as the corpse that rests beneath its wall.
A thousand mourners deck the pomp of death
To day, the breathing marble glows above
To decorate its memory, and tongues
Are busy of its life: to-morrow, worms
In silence and in darkness seize their prey.

Within the many prison's mouldering courts,
Fearless and free the ruddy children played,
Weaving gay chaplets for their innocent brows
With the green ivy and the red wall-flower,
That mock the dung on's unavailing gloom;
The ponderous chains, and gratings of strong iron,
The ris rusted amid heaps of broken stone,
That mingled slowly with their native earth:
There the broad beam of day, which feebly once
Loghted the check of lean captivity
With a pale and sickly glare, then freely shone
On the jone smiles of infant playfulness:
No more the shuddering voice of hoarse despair
Paled through the echoing vaults, but soothing notes

Of ivy-facered winds and gladsome birds
And merriment were resonant around.
These rulas sort jeft not a wreek behind:
Their everments, wide scattered o'er the globe,
I: harcier states were mouided, and became
Ministrant to a blissful impuses:
Thus boman things were perfected, and earth,
Even as a ehtid beneath its mother's love,
Was strengthened in all excellence, and grew
Fairer and tower with each passing year.

Now Time his dusky pennons o'er the scene
Coses in steadfast darkness, and the past
Fades from our charmed sight. My task is done:
Thy lore is learned. Earth's wonders are thine own,
With all the fear and all the hope they bring.
My spells are past: the present now recurs.
Ah me! a pathless wilderness remains
Yet unsui-dued by man's reclaiming hand.

Yet, human Spirit! bravely hold thy course,
Let virtue teach thee firmly to pursue
The gradual paths of an aspiring change:
For birth and life and death, and that strange state
Before the naked soul has found its home,
All tend to perfect happiness, and urge
The restless wheels of being on their way,
Whose flashing spokes, instinet with infinite life,
Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal.
For birth but wakes the spirit to the sense
Of outward shows, whose unexperienced shape
New modes of passion to its frame may lend;
Life is its state of action, and the store
Of all events is aggregated there
That variegate the eternal universe;
Death is a gate of dreariness and gloom,
That leads to azure isles and beaming skies,
And happy regions of eternal hope,
Therefore, O Spirit! fearlessly bear on:
Though storms may break the primrose on its stalk,
Though frosts may blight the freshness of its bloom,
Yet spring's awakening breath will woo the earth
To feed with kindliest dews its favourite flower,
That blooms in mossy banks and darksome glens,
Lighting the greenwood with its sunny smile.

Fear not then, Spirit, death's disrobing hand;
So welcome when the tyrant is awake,
So welcome when the bigot's hell-torch burns;
'Tis but the voyage of a darksome hour,
The transient gulf-dream of a startling sleep.
Death is no foe to virtue: earth has seen
Love's brightest roses on the scaffold bloom,
Mingling with freedom's fadeless laurels there,
And presaging the truth of visioned bliss.
Are there not hopes within thee, which this scene
Of linked and gradual being has confirmed?
Whose stingings bade thy heart look further still.
When to the moonlight walk, by Henry led,
Sweetly and sadly thou didst talk of death?
And wilt thou rudely tear them from thy breast,
Listening supinely to a bigot's creed,
Or tamely crouching to the tyrant's rod,
Whose iron thongs are red with human gore?
Never but bravely bearing on, thy will
Is destined an eternal war to wage
With tyranny and falsehood, and uproot
The germs of misery from the human heart.
Thine is the hand whose piety would soothe
The thorny pillow of unhappy crime,

between this immense heap of calamities and the assertion of truth or the maintenance of justice.

Kings, and ministers of state, the real authors of the calamity, sit unmolested in their cabinet, while those against whom the fury of the storm is directed are, for the most part, persons who have been trepanned into the service, or who are dragged unwillingly from their peaceful homes into the field of battle. A soldier is a man whose business it is to kill those who never offended him, and who are the innocent martyrs of other men's iniquities. Whatever may become of the abstract question of the justifiableness of war, it seems impossible that the soldier should not be a depraved and unnatural being.

To these more serious and momentous considerations it may be proper to add a recollection of the ridiculousness of the military character. Its first constituent is obedience; a soldier is, of all descriptions of men, the most completely a machine; yet his profession inevitably teaches him something of dogmatism, swaggering, and self-consequence: he is like the puppet of a show-man, who, at the very time he is made to strut and swell, and display the most farcical airs, we perfectly know cannot assume the most insignificant gesture, advance either to the right or the left, but as he is moved by his exhibitor.—Godwin's Enquirer, Essay V.

I will here subjoin a little poem, so strongly expressive of my abhorrence of despotism and falsehood, that I fear lest it never again may be depictured so vividly. This opportunity is perhaps the only one that ever will occur of rescuing it from oblivion.

FALSEHOOD AND VICE.

A DIALOGUE.

WHILST monarchs laughed upon their thrones
To hear a famished nation's groans,
And hugged the wealth wrung from the woe
That makes its eyes and veins o'erflow,-
Those thrones, high built upon the heaps
Of bones where frenzied famine sleeps,
Where slavery wields her scourge of iron,
Red with mankind's unheeded gore,
And war's mad fiends the scene environ,
Mingling with shrieks a drunken roar,
There Vice and Falsehood took their stand,
High raised above th' unhappy land.

FALSEHOOD.

Brother! arise from the dainty fare

Which thousands have toiled and bled to bestow; A finer feast for thy hungry ear

Is the news that I bring of human woe.

VICE.

And, secret one! what hast thou done,
To compare, in thy tumid pride, with me?
I, whose career, through the blasted year,
Has been tracked by despair and agony.

FALSEHOOD.

What have I done?-I have torn the robe
From baby Truth's unsheltered form,
And round the desolated globe
Borne safely the bewildering charm:
My tyrant-slaves to a dungeon-floor
Have bound the fearless innocent,
And streams of fertilizing gore
Flow from her bosom's hideous rent,

Which this unfailing dagger gave....
I dread that blood-no more-this day
Is ours, though her eternal ray
Must shine upon our grave.

Yet know, proud Vice, had I not given
To thee the robe I stole from heaven,
Thy shape of ugliness and fear
Had never gained admission here.

VICE.

And know that, had I disdained to toil,
But sate in my loathsome cave the while,
And ne'er to these hateful sons of heaven

GOLD, MONARCHY, and MURDER, given;
Hadst thou with all thine art essayed
One of thy games then to have played,
With all thine overweening boast,
Falsehood, I tell thee thou hadst lost!-
Yet wherefore this dispute?—we tend,
Fraternal, to one common end;

In this cold grave beneath my feet
Will our hopes, our fears, and our labours, meet.

FALSEHOOD.

I brought my daughter, RELIGION, on earth;
She smothered Reason's babes in their birth;
But dreaded their mother's eye severe,—
So the crocodile slunk off slily in fear,
And loosed her bloodhounds from the den....
They started from dreams of slaughtered men,
And, by the light of her poison eye,
Did her work o'er the wide earth frightfully;
The dreadful stench of her torches' flare,
Fed with human fat, polluted the air:
The curses, the shrieks, the reaseless cries
Of the many mingling miseries,
As on she trod, ascended high
And trumpeted my victory!-
Brother, tell what thou hast done.

VICE.

I have extinguished the noon-day sun
In the carnage-smoke of battles won:
Famine, murder, hell, and power,
Were glutted in that glorious hour,
Which searchless fate had stamped for me
With the seal of her security....
For the bloated wretch on yonder throne
Commanded the bloody fray to rise-
Like me, he joyed at the stifled moan
Wrung from a nation's miseries;

While the snakes, whose slime even him defilea
In ecstacies of malice smiled:

They thought 'twas theirs,—but mine the deed!
Theirs is the toil, but mine the meed-
Ten thousand victims madly bleed.
They dream that tyrants goad them there
With poisonous war to taint the air:
These tyrants, on their beds of thorn,
Swell with the thoughts of murderous fame,
And with their gains to lift my name,
Restless they plan from night to morn:
I-I do all; without my aid
Thy daughter, that relentless maid,
Could never o'er a death-bed urge
The fury of her venomed scourge.

FALSEHOOD.

Brother, well the world is ours;
Aud whether thou or I have won,
The pestilence expectant lowers
On all beneath yon blasted sun.

Our joys, our toils, our honours, meet
In the milk-white and wormy winding-sheet;
A short-lived hope, unceasing care,
Some heartless scraps of godly prayer,
A moody curse, and a frenzied sleep
Ere gapes the grave's unclosing deep,
A tyrant's dream, a coward's start,
That ice that clings to a priestly heart,
A judge's frown, a courtier's smile,
Make the great whole for which we toil;
And, brother, whether thou or I
Have done the work of misery,
It little boots: thy toil and pain,

Without my aid, were more than vain;
And but for thee I ne'er had sate
The guardian of heaven's palace gate.

P. 9, col. 2, 1. 27.

Thus do the generations of the earth

Go to the grave and issue from the womb. "One generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; unto the place whence the rivers come, thither shall they return again."—Ecclesiastes, chap. i.

P. 9, col. 2, 1. 30.

Even as the leaves

Which the keen frost-wind of the waning year
Has scuttered on the forest soil.

Ολη περ φύλλων γενεὴ, τοιήδε καὶ ἀνδρῶν.
Φύλλα τὰ μέν τ' ἄνεμος χαμάδις χέει, ἄλλα δέ θ' ὕλη
Τηλεθόωσα φύει· ἔαρος δ ̓ ἐπιγίγνεται ώρη.
"Ως ἀνδρῶν γενεὴ, ἡ μὲν φύει, ἥδ ̓ ἀπολήγει.
IAIAA. Z'. 1. 146.

P. 10, col. 1, 1. 19.

The mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings. Suave, mari magno turbantibus æquora ventis, E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem: Non, quia vexari quemquam 'st jocunda voluptas, Sed, quibus ipse malis careas, quia cernere suave 'st. Per campos instructa, tua sine parte pericli, Suave etiam belli certamina magna tueri: Sed nil dulcius est, bene quam munita tenere, Edita doctrina sapientum templa serena; Despicere unde queas alios, passimque videre Errare, atque viam palanteis quærere vitæ; Certare ingenio; contendere nobilitate, Nocteis atque dies niti præstante labore Ad summas emergere opes, rerumque potiri.

O miseras hominum menteis! O pectora cæca! Lucret. lib. ii.

P. 10, col. 1, 1. 55.

And statesmen boast

Of wealth!

There is no real wealth but the labour of man. Were the mountains of gold and the valleys of silver, the world would not be oue grain of corn the richer; no one comfort would be added to the human race. In consequence of our consideration for the precious metals, one man is enabled to heap to himself luxuries at the expense of the necessaries of his neighbour; a system

admirably fitted to produce all the varieties of disease and crire, which never fail to characterise the two extremes of opulence and penury. A speculator takes pride to himself as the promoter of his country's prosperity, who employs a number of hands in the manufacture of articles avowedly destitute of use, or subservient only to the unhallowed cravings of luxury and ostentation. The nobleman who employs the peasants

of his neighbourhood in building his palaces, until "jam pauca aratro jugera, regiæ moles relinquent," flatters himself that he has gained the title of a patriot by yielding to the impulses of vanity. The show and pomp of courts adduce the same apology for their continuance; and many a fête has been given, many a woman has eclipsed her beauty by her dress, to benefit the labouring poor and to encourage trade. Who does not see that this is a remedy which aggravates, whilst it palliates, the countless diseases of society? The poor are set to labour,-for what? Not the food for which they famish: not the blankets for want of which their babes are frozen by the cold of their miserable hovels: not those comforts of civilisation without which civilised man is far more miserable than the meanest savage; oppressed as he is by all its insidious evils, within the daily and taunting prospect of its innumerable benefits assiduously exhibited before him: -no; for the pride of power, for the miserable isolation of pride, for the false pleasures of the hundredth part of society. No greater evidence is afforded of the wide-extended and radical mistakes of civilised man than this fact: those arts which are essential to his very being are held in the greatest contempt; employ. ments are lucrative in an inverse ratio to their usefulness: the jeweller, the toyman, the actor, gains fame and wealth by the exercise of his useless and ridiculous art; whilst the cultivator of the earth, he without whom society must cease to subsist, struggles through contempt and penury, and perishes by that famine which, but for his unceasing exertion, would annihilate the rest of mankind.

I will not insult common sense by insisting on the doctrine of the natural equality of man. The question is not concerning its desirableness, but its practicabil. ity; so far as it is practicable, it is desirable. Thai state of human society which approaches nearer to an equal partition of its benefits and evils should, cæteris paribus, be preferred; but so long as we conceive that a wanton expenditure of human labour, not for the necessities, not even for the luxuries, of the mass of society, but for the egotism and ostentation of a few of its members, is defensible on the ground of public justice, so long we neglect to approximate to the redemption of the human race.

Labour is required for physical, and leisure for moral improvement from the former of these advantages the rich, and from the latter the poor, by the inevitable conditions of their respective situations, are precluded. A state which should combine the advantages of both would be subjected to the evils of neither. H that is deficient in firm health, or vigorous intellect, is but half a man; hence it follows, that, to subject the labouring classes to unnecessary labour, is wantonly to deprive them of any opportunities of intellectual improvement and that the rich are heaping up for their own mischief the disease, lassitude, and ennui, by which their existence is rendered an intolerable burden.

English reformers exclaim against sinecures,-but the true pension list is the rent-roll of the landed pro. * See Rousseau, "De l'Inégalité parmi les Hommes,

note 7.