Till all is ours that sages taught,
That poets sang, or heroes wrought.

Night is the time to weep;

To wet with unseen tears

Those graves of memory, where sleep
The joys of other years;

Hopes that were angels in their birth,
But perish'd young, like things on earth!

Night is the time to watch;
Ön ocean's dark expanse
To hail the Pleiades, or catch

The full moon's earliest glance,
That brings unto the homesick mind
All we have loved and left behind.

Night is the time for care;
Brooding on hours misspent,
To see the spectre of despair
Come to our lonely tent;

Like Brutus, midst his slumbering host,
Startled by Caesar's stalwart ghost.

Night is the time to muse;

Then from the eye the soul

Takes flight, and, with expanding views,

Beyond the starry pole,

Descries, athwart the abyss of night,

The dawn of uncreated light.

Night is the time to pray;

Our Saviour oft withdrew To desert mountains far away;

So will his followers do;

Steal from the throng to haunts untrod,
And hold communion there with God.

Night is the time for death;

When all around is peace,

Calmly to yield the weary breath,
From sin and suffering cease;
Think of heaven's bliss, and give the sign
To parting friends:-such death be mine!

ASPIRATIONS OF YOUTH.

Higher, higher will we climb
Up the mount of glory,

That our names may live through time
In our country's story;

Happy, when her welfare calls,

He who conquers, he who falls.

Deeper, deeper let us toil

In the mines of knowledge;

Nature's wealth and learning's spoil
Win from school and college;
Delve we there for richer gems
Than the stars of diadems.

Onward, onward may we press
Through the path of duty;
Virtue is true happiness,

Excellence true beauty.
Minds are of celestial birth;
Make we, then, a heaven of earth.

Closer, closer let us knit

Hearts and hands together,
Where our fireside comforts sit,
In the wildest weather;

Oh! they wander wide who roam,
For the joys of life, from home.

Nearer, nearer, bands of love
Draw our souls in union,
To our Father's house above,
To the saints' communion;
Thither every hope ascend,
There may all our labors end.

THE COMMON LOT.

Once, in the flight of ages past,
There lived a man: and who was he?
Mortal! howe'er thy lot be cast,

That man resembled thee.

Unknown the region of his birth,

The land in which he died unknown:
His name has perish'd from the earth,
This truth survives alone:-

That joy, and grief, and hope, and fear,
Alternate triumph'd in his breast;
His bliss and wo-a smile, a tear!
Oblivion hides the rest.

The bounding pulse, the languid limb,
The changing spirits' rise and fall;
We know that these were felt by him,
For these are felt by all.

He suffer'd-but his pangs are o'er;
Enjoy'd-but his delights are fled;
Had friends-his friends are now no more;
And foes-his foes are dead.

He loved-but whom he loved the grave
Hath lost in its unconscious womb:
Oh, she was fair! but naught could save
Her beauty from the tomb.

Friend after friend departs;

Who hath not lost a friend?
There is no union here of hearts
That finds not here an end:
Were this frail world our final rest,
Living or dying, none were blest.

Beyond this flight of time-
Beyond the reign of death-
There surely is some blessed clime
Where life is not a breath,
Nor life's affections transient fire,
Whose sparks fly upward and expire.

There is a world above,

Where parting is unknown; A long eternity of love,

Form'd for the good alone,

And faith beholds the dying, here,
Translated to that glorious sphere!

Thus star by star declines,
Till all are past away,

As morning high and higher shines
To pure and perfect day;

Nor sink those stars in empty night,

But hide themselves in heaven's own light.

HUMILITY.

The bird that soars on highest wing

Builds on the ground her lowly nest;
And she that doth most sweetly sing
Sings in the shade when all things rest
-In lark and nightingale we see
What honor hath humility.

When Mary chose "the better part,"
She meekly sat at Jesus' feet;
And Lydia's gently-open'd heart

Was made for God's own temple meet;
-Fairest and best adorn'd is she

Whose clothing is humility.

The saint that wears heaven's brightest crown

In deepest adoration bends;

The weight of glory bows him down

Then most when most his soul ascends;
-Nearest the throne itself must be

The footstool of humility.

THE SUPERIORITY OF POETRY OVER SCULPTURE and

PAINTING.

Let us bring-not into gladiatorial conflict, but into honorable competition, where neither can suffer disparagement-one of the masterpieces of ancient sculpture, and two stanzas from Childe Harold, in which that very statue is turned into verse which seems almost to make it visible:

THE DYING GLADIATOR.

"I see before me the Gladiator lie:

He leans upon his hand; his manly brow
Consents to death, but conquers agony;
And his droop'd head sinks gradually low;

And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow
From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one,
Like the first of a thunder-shower; and now
The arena swims around him, he is gone,

Ere ceased the inhuman shout that hail'd the wretch who won."

Now, all this, sculpture has embodied in perpetual marble, and every association touched upon in the description might spring up in a well-instructed mind while contemplating the insulated figure which personifies the expiring champion. Painting might take up the same subject, and represent the amphitheatre thronged to the height with ferocious faces, all bent upon the exulting conqueror and his prostrate antagonist,-a thousand for one of them sympathizing rather with the transport of the former than the agony of the latter. Here, then, sculpture and painting have reached their climax; neither of them can give the actual thoughts of the personages whom they exhibit so palpably to the outward sense, that the character of those thoughts cannot be mistaken. Poetry goes further than both; and when one of the sisters has laid down her chisel, the other her pencil, she continues her strain; wherein, having already sung what each has pictured, she thus reveals that secret of the sufferer's breaking heart, which neither of them could intimate by any visible sign. But we must return to the swoon of the dying man:

"The arena swims around him, he is gone,

Ere ceased the inhuman shout that hail'd the wretch who wo

"He heard it, but he heeded not,-his eyes

Were with his heart, and that was far away;
He reck'd not of the life he lost, nor prize,
-But, where his rude hut by the Danube lay,
There were his young barbarians all at play,
There was their Dacian mother; he, their sire,
Butcher'd to make a Roman holiday;
All this rush'd with his blood."

*

*

*

Myriads of eyes had gazed upon that statue; through myriads of minds all the images and ideas connected with the combat and the fall, the spectators and the scene, had passed in the presence of that unconscious marble which has given immortality to the pangs of death; but not a soul among all the beholders through eighteen centuries-not one-had ever before thought of the "rude hut," the "Dacian mother," the "young barbarians." At length came the poet of passion, and, looking down upon "The Dying Gladiator" (less as what it was than what it represented), turned the marble into man, and endowed it with human affections; then, away over the Apennines and over the Alps, away, on the wings of irrepressible sympathy, flew his spirit to the banks of the Danube, where, "with his heart," were the "eyes" of the victim, under the nightfall of death; for "there were his young barbarians all at play, and there their Dacian mother." This is nature; this is truth. While the conflict continued, the combatant thought of himself only, he aimed at nothing but victory; when life and this were lost, his last thoughts, his sole thoughts, would turn to his wife and his little children.

Lecture First.

CHARACTERISTICS OF PROSE AND VERSE.

There is reason as well as custom in that conventional simplicity which best becomes prose, and that conventional ornament which is allowed to verse; but splendid ornament is no more essential to verse than naked simplicity is to prose. The gravest critics place tragedy in the highest rank of poetical achievements :

"Sometimes let gorgeous Tragedy,

With sceptred pall, come sweeping by,
Presenting Thebes' or Pelops' line,

Or the tale of Troy divine."-Il Penseroso.

Yet the noblest, most impassioned scenes are frequently distinguished from prose only by the cadence of the verse, which, in this species of composition, is permitted to be so loose, that, where the diction is the most exquisite, the melody of the rhythm