glowing even to extravagance, and its sentiments generous, though perhaps tinged slightly with ultra-philanthropy. The poems annexed to it are among his most beautiful compositions. The " Harp of Sorrow," somewhat resembling in the thought the first of the Anacreontic Odes, and which is equally appropriate as a preface to the rest, is a fine expression of individual feeling. We extract two stanzas on the Æolian harp :—

"Thus o'er the light Æolian lyre

The winds of dark November stray,
Touch the quick nerve of every wire,
And on its magic pulses play ;-

Till all the air around,
Mysterious murmurs fill,

A strange bewildering dream of sound,

Most heavenly sweet,-yet mournful still."

I must also recommend to my readers an exquisite little piece entitled, “A Walk in Spring;" "The Dial;" "Bolehill Trees ;" a fine ballad on the Loss of the Britannia; and a poem on the death of a young lady; who, in her last illness, had been soothed by the perusal of his poems. One of these pieces, "The Molehill," bears a strong resemblance, in the idea, to a piece of Barry Cornwall's, called "The Dream;" in each the poet calls up, in imagination, the forms and scenes in past history, on which his mind has been accustomed to dwell; and the contrast is curious. One surveys the " mighty past" through a medium like that of a cheerful and lightsome summer morning; to the other, the view seems overshaded by a calm and gentle twilight. One calls up the shades of olden love, and beauty, and mirth, the wood nymphs, and youthful gods, and festive monarchs, and heroes who lost all the world for love: the other evokes the legislators, and patriots, and inventors, and poets of old time; and if he deviates from his own course it is in his own way :

"With moonlight softness Helen's charms
Break through the spectred gloom."

The one, when once his vision of life, and joy, and beauty is broken by a sound of terror, wakes and sleeps no more; his view is bounded by the sprightly and happy world before him : the other, as the "vision of the tomb" dissolves, looks beyond— his thoughts revert to his own immortal hopes and fears, and he concludes in a strain of pensive hope and humble triumph.

The "World before the Flood" is, we think, the first of Montgomery's performances. The subject is happy; it is connected with high and beautiful associations; the age of the patriarchs, as has been well observed, is one golden age; the

beau ideal of simplicity and happiness; and the spirit of gentleness and affection which the poet has breathed through all his delineations of the domestic life of the patriarchs, imparts to them a beauty which, in its kind, I know not that I have seen equalled. Southey sometimes approaches to it. The Second Canto, in particular, is one piece of chaste and delicious magic from beginning to end; a consecrated fairy ground-a picture of innocent love, touched with an aerial tint, which makes it the more enchanting. I shall quote the address to Twilight from the Sixth Canto :

"I love thee, Twilight! as thy shadows roll, The calm of evening steals upon my soul, Sublimely tender, solemnly serene,

Still as the hour, enchanting as the scene.

I love thee, Twilight! for thy gleams impart
Their dear, their dying influence to my heart,
When o'er the harp of thought thy passing wind
Awakens all the music of the mind,

And Joy and Sorrow, as the spirit burns,

And Hope and Memory sweep the chords by turns,
While Contemplation, on seraphic wings,
Mounts with the flame of sacrifice, and sings.
Twilight! I love thee; let thy glooms increase
Till every feeling, every pulse is peace;
Slow from the sky the light of day declines,
Clearer within the dawn of glory shines,
Revealing, in the hour of Nature's rest,
A world of wonders in the Poet's breast:
Deeper, O Twilight! then thy shadows roll,
An awful vision opens on my soul."

Among the poems subjoined, I am struck particularly with "The Peak Mountains," ""A Daughter to her Mother," and "Departed Days."

Of" Greenland" I have scarce time to say any thing. In want of system, and an air of historical detail, it resembles "The West Indies;" but it contains many gorgeous descriptions of icy scenery, and sweet touches of domestic tenderness. The last Canto, which relates the destruction of the Colony of East Greenland by a succession of calamities, is one rapid succession of magnificent and mournful phantasms-the glories of Nature being introduced, as it were, to throw a splendid pall round the departing hopes of man. The poem opens thus :

"The moon is watching in the sky; the stars
Are swiftly wheeling on their golden cars;
Ocean, outstretcht with infinite expanse,
Serenely slumbers in a glorious trance;

The tide, o'er which no troubling spirits breathe,
Reflects a cloudless firmament beneath;

Where, poised as in the centre of a sphere,
A ship above and ship below appear;
A double image, pictured on the deep,
The vessel o'er its shadow seems to sleep;
Yet, like the host of heaven, that never rest,
With evanescent motion to the west,

The pageant glides through loneliness and night,
And leaves behind a rippling wake of light."

The concluding lines in the following description of a Moravian settlement strike us as of extreme beauty :

"Soon, homes of humble form, and structure rude,
Raised sweet society in solitude:

And the lorn traveller there, at fall of night,
Could trace from distant hills the spangled light,
Which now from many a cottage window stream'd,
Or in full glory round the chapel beam'd;
While hymning voices, in the silent shade,
Music of all his soul's affections made."

The following is from the last Canto :

"Comes there no ship again to Greenland's shore?
There comes another ;-there shall come no more;
Nor this shall reach an haven :-What are these
Stupendous monuments upon the seas?
Works of Omnipotence, in wondrous forms,
Immoveable as mountains in the storms?

Far as Imagination's eye can roll,

One range of Alpine glaciers to the pole

Flanks the whole eastern coast; and, branching wide,
Arches o'er many a league th' indignant tide,

That works and frets, with unavailing flow,

To mine a passage to the beach below;

Thence from its neck that winter-yoke to rend

And down the gulph the crashing fragments send.
There lies a vessel in this realm of frost,

Not wreck'd, nor stranded, yet for ever lost;

Its keel embedded in the solid mass;

Its glistening sails appear expanded glass;

The transverse ropes with pearls enormous strung,
The yards with icicles grotesquely hung.

Wrapt in the topmast shrouds there rests a boy,
His old sea-faring father's only joy ;

Sprung from a race of rovers, ocean-born,

Nursed at the helm, he trod dry-land with scorn;
Through fourscore years from port to port he veer'd,
Quicksand, nor rock, nor foe, nor tempest fear'd;
Now cast ashore, though like a hulk he lie,
His son at sea is ever in his eye,

And his prophetic thought, from age to age,
Esteems the waves his offspring's heritage:
He ne'er shall know, in his Norwegian cot,
How brief that son's career, how strange his lot;
Writhed round the mast, and sepulchred in air,
Him shall no worm devour, no vulture tear;

D

Congeal'd to adamant his frame shall fast,
Though empires change, till time and tide be past.

On deck, in groupes embracing as they died,
Singly, erect, or slumbering side by side,
Behold the crew!-They sail'd, with hope elate,
For eastern Greenland; till, ensnared by fate,
In toils that mock'd their utmost strength and skill,
They felt, as by a charm, their ship stand still;
The madness of the wildest gale that blows,
Were mercy to that shudder of repose,

When withering horror struck from heart to heart
The blunt rebound of Death's benumbing dart,
And each, a petrifaction at his post,

Look'd on yon father, and gave up the ghost; *
He meekly kneeling, with his hands upraised,
His beard of driven snow, eyes fix'd and glaz'd,
Alone among the dead shall yet survive,
-Th'imperishable dead that seem alive;

-Th' immortal dead, whose spirits, breaking free,
Bore his last words into eternity,

While with a seraph's zeal, a Christian's love,
Till his tongue fail'd, he spoke of joys above.
Now motionless, amidst the icy air,

He breathes from marble lips unutter'd prayer.
The clouds condensed, with dark, unbroken hue
Of stormy purple, overhang his view,

Save in the west, to which he strains his sight,
One golden streak, that grows intensely bright,
Till thence th' emerging sun, with lightning blaze,
Pours the whole quiver of his arrowy rays;
The smitten rocks to instant diamond turn,
And round th' expiring saint such visions burn,
As if the gates of Paradise were thrown
Wide open to receive his soul;-

The glory vanishes, and over all

-'tis flown.

Cimmerian darkness spreads her funeral pall.

Morn shall return, and noon, and eve, and night
Meet here with interchanging shade and light;
But from this bark no timber shall decay,
Of these cold forms no feature pass away;

Perennial ice around th' encrusted bow,

The peopled deck, and full-rigg'd masts shall grow,
Till from the sun himself the whole be hid,

Or spied beneath a crystal pyramid;

As in pure amber, with divergent lines,

A rugged shell emboss'd with sea-weed shines.

From age to age increased with annual snow,

This new Mont Blanc among the clouds may glow,

The Danish Chronicle says, that the Greenland colonists were tributary to the kings of Norway from the year 1023; soon after which they embraced Christianity. In its more flourishing period this province is stated to have been divided into a hundred parishes, under the superintendence of a bishop. From 1120 to 1408 the succession of seventeen bishops is recorded. In the last-mentioned year, Andrew, ordained Bishop of Greenland, by Askill, Archbishop of Drontheim, sailed for his diocese; but whether he arrived there, or was cast away, was never known. To his imagined fate this episode alludes.

Whose conic peak, that earliest greets the dawn.
And latest from the sun's shut eye withdrawn,
Shall from the zenith, through incumbent gloom,
Burn like a lamp upon this naval tomb.

But when th' Archangel's trumpet sounds on high,
The pile shall burst to atoms through the sky,
And leave its dead, upstarting, at the call,

Naked and pale, before the Judge of all."

Among the concluding poems, there are some of exceeding beauty. The lines entitled " Incognita" are characteristic (in the conclusion almost too characteristic) of the author. There is a sweetness in the stanza beginning "Somewhere," which reminds me of more than one passage of Burns :—

*Henry Cornelius Agrippa, of Nettesheim, counsellor to Charles V. Emperor of Germany, the author of "Occult Philosophy," and other profound works,-is said to have shown to the Earl of Surrey the image of his mistress Geraldine, in a magical mirror.