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One little space prolong my mournful day! One little lapse suspend thy last decree!

I am a youthful traveller in the way,

And this slight boon would consecrate to thee, Ere I with Death shake hands, and smile that I am free!

The mournful close of Kirke White's history is too familiar to the memories of us all to require any further mention. What I could add would only deepen the melancholy of the story. The "youthful traveller" has reached that Home, where no harp hangs upon the cypress!

COWLEY,

AND HIS FRIEND WILLIAM HERVEY.

He was my friend, the truest friend on earth;
A strong and mighty influence joined our birth.
Nor did we envy the most sounding name

By friendship given of old to Fame-
None but his brethren he, and sisters knew
Whom the kind youth preferred to me;
And even in that we did agree,

For much above myself I loved them too.

Cowley on the death of Hervey.

COMPLAINTS of the dreariness of Cambridge are as old as Milton. In our own days it was said, with some exaggeration, to have driven Robert Hall mad. "When I look upon a tree," he remarked, "it seems like Nature putting out signals of distress." Yet there is one walk behind the colleges which Meditation might love to haunt; and here we know that Cowley delighted to wander, or muse by the river side, as he has told us in his own beautiful verses:―

Cum me tranquilla mente sedentem,
Vidisti in ripa, Çame serene, tua.

The very name of Cowley has a peculiar charm. The sunshine of his temper diffused a warmth and

beauty over a cold and melancholy fortune. Johnson has ridiculed his love of the country, yet his writings amply prove it to have been sincere. He said finely, that he always went with delight out of the world, as it was man's, into the world, as it was Nature's, and as it was God's. And in another place,

God the first garden made, and the first city, Cain.

A line in which we have the probable original of Cowper's celebrated verse—

God made the country, and man made the town.

Cowley's sojourn at Trinity forms the pleasantest passage in his history. Cambridge, although reckoning our greatest poets among her children, has no cause to boast of their gratitude or affection. Milton's hostility and hatred are, alas, too well remembered; Spenser, indeed, has mentioned the University in terms of regard, but of his own college not a single notice any where occurs; while Dryden's preference of "Athens in his riper age, shows how freshly he bore in mind the fortnight's confinement within the college walls, &c. with Cowley, his college seems to have possessed all the charm of a home, and he pours out his love for it, as for a mother. We hear of no

But

scholastical bur sticking in the throat, no voice cracked with metaphysical gargarisms*; all is dear within and without; every tree partakes his affection. How his heart beats, if we may employ the metaphor, in the dedication of his poems to Alma Mater!

O mihi jucundum Grantæ super omnia nomen!
O penitus toto corde receptus amor!

O pulchræ sine luxu ædes, vitæque beatæ,

Splendida paupertas, ingenuusque decor.
O chara ante alias, magnorum nomine regum
Digna Domus! Trini nomine digna Dei!
O Sacri Fontes! et sacræ vatibus umbræ,

Quas recreant avium Pieridumque chori.
O Camus! Phœbo nullus quo gratior amnis!
Amnibus auriferis invidiosus inops !
Ah mihi si vestræ reddat bona gaudia sedis,
Det que Deus doctâ posse quiete frui,
Qualis eram cum me tranquillá mente sedentem,
Vidisti in ripa, Came serene, tua.

What a delightful picture have we of the poet in the last couplet, sitting in the golden quiet of his studious youth, with a tranquil and thoughtful mind, on the grassy bank of the Cam, bending over his own shadow in the unruffled water. We see him on the warm eve of some long Summer

* Milton.

day, reclined by the side of his friend Herveythe Lycidas of Cowley-with half-closed eye watching the sunbeams through the leaves; while the Muse perhaps stood before him—

Bodied, arrayed, and seen by an internal light.
The Complaint.

Our poetical biography contains no episode more beautiful or touching than the friendship of these affectionate companions; both students of Trinity, both youths of genius, both eager in the pursuit of knowledge. Of Hervey, indeed, we know nothing, except from the tender elegy in which his sorrowful friend has enshrined his virtues and his talents.

which Milton conse

No passage of that poem crated to the memory of Edward King, contains a thought so affecting, as the sudden tolling of the funeral bell in the following stanza:

It was a dismal and a fearful night,

Scarce could the moon drive on the unwilling light,
When sleep, Death's image, left my troubled breast,
By something liker death possest.

My eyes with tears did uncommanded flow,
And on my soul hung the dull weight

Of some intolerable fate

What bell was that? ah, me! too well I know!

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