The King of Thule,

Oh! true was his heart while he breathed,

That King over Thulé of old,
So she that adored him bequeathed

Him, dying, a beaker of gold.

At banquet and supper for years has
He brimmingly filled it up,
His eyes overflowing with tears as
He drank from that beaker-cup.

When Death came to wither his pleasures
He parcelled his cities wide,

His castles, his lands, and his treasures,
But the beaker he laid aside.

They drank the red wine from the chalice,
His barons and marshals brave;
The monarch sat in his rock-palace
Above the white foam of the wave.

And now, growing weaker and weaker,
He quaffed his last Welcome to Death,
And hurled the golden beaker

Down into the flood beneath.

He saw it winking and sinking,
And drinking the foam so hoar;
The light from his eyes was shrinking,
Nor drop did he ever drink more.

"It is the speaker's last argument that weighs with me," said Byron. It is to the last word of a song that our ears tingle. There is a vibration from the last word that we miss in every other word; mirthful, if the song be mirthful; melancholy, if the song be melancholy. We always look down at the end of a ballad, and if the last word be pretty, we fall at once in love with the entire, as the Prince in the fairy-tale fell in love with Cinderella directly he cast eyes on her slipper. The last word

Comes o'er our ear like the sweet South,

(not Dr. South, the preacher,)

Breathing upon a bank of violets,

Let the echo of that call visit the cells
of our brain oft in the deep midnight
for months to come. We will yet hear
and answer. But now, and for a sea-
son, our lips are sealed. Unless we alter
our mind. A contingency which may
occur. Nobody knows.
At present,
however, our resolution is firm.

The torch shall be extinguished, which hath lit
Our midnight lamp-and what is writ is writ.
Would it were worthier!

We close this Anthology by a poem from Kerner.

"Reading and writing," says honest Dogberry, "comes by nature." There is a good deal of truth in the remark; more by half than Shakspeare imagined.

(a leaf-bank, if not a branch-bank,) and A poet takes to ink as a duckling takes

Stealing, and giving odour, (like a pickpocket abstracting a scented handkerchief.)

It so happens that the last word of each of our last two ballads is more. Talismanic word! which puzzled Horne Tooke, and which the world so well understands, the sound of which in England is Life, and in France is Death. It calls upon us for other songs. Long let it so continue to call.

to water: "he lisps in numbers, for the numbers come." It is all instinct. The individual is passive in the matter. He is like a voyager at sea, without power to leave the vessel he is in, or arrest its progress. He follows the Will-o'-the-Wisp of Rhyme," a weary chase, a wasted hour," because he must follow it, and for no other reason. rushes the iron towards the loadstone, the moth towards the flame, the earth towards the sun.

So

At the same time it is to be noted, that as to "reading and writing," the poet uniformly reads and writes just as much and as well as, and no more and no better than Nature ordains. This is the age of wonders; but still every body cannot excel everybody, even in poetry. It is a result of the natural, no less than of the canon law, that there shall be many Priors and few Popes. The eloquence of one man will shake thrones, where that of twenty other men cannot interfere with the equilibrium of a three-legged stool.

With these irrefragable truths we have been familiar from childhood. It would, therefore, be quite impossible that we should ever censure anybody for his or her intellectual deficiencies. We have never presumed to censure our particular friend Kerner. We have expressed some pity for him generally, because, in despite of etiquette and education, we now and then express what we feel, but we have never threatened him with the tomahawk.

He is unfortunate, poor fellow. Nature has, as yet, only half taught him to read and write. His Reading-madeDifficult is still in his venerable hands, and when we ask for a specimen of his calligraphy we are invited to contemplate a blurred copy-book, full of pothooks and hangers. What then?— His brains were not of his own constructing. The worst that can be said of him is, that he has made indifferent poetry because he was unable to make different. We are not irrational

enough to condemn, or even to contemn him. On the contrary, we have doled out, to the fraction of a pennyweight, the precise avoirdupois quantum of panegyric that his deserts called for. Surely, therefore, he ought to be contented.

But if, as we suspect, he remain still as dissatisfied as ever, we would just request his attention to the following translation, and ask him whether he be not, after all, our debtor to a very serious extent.

My Adieu to the Muse.
1830.

Winter is nearing my dark threshold fast:
Already in low knells and broken wailings,

Ever austerer, menaces the blast

Which, soon a tempest, with its fierce assailings
Will swoop down on its unresistant prey.

The Iris-coloured firmament, whereto

Imagination turned, weeps day by day,

For some lost fragment of its gold and blue,
And the dun clouds are mustering thick, that soon
Will overdark the little of the beams

Of that unfaithful and most wasted Moon

Of Hope, that yet with pallid face (as gleams

A dying lamp amid grey ruins,) wins

The cozened spirit o'er its flowerless path.
So be it! When the wanderer's night begins,
And the hoarse winds are heard afar in wrath,
He gazes on the curtained West with tears,

And lists disturbedly each sound, nor sees
Aught but dismay in the vague Night, nor hears
Aught but funereal voices on the breeze,
But when his hour of gloom and slumber done-
He looks forth on the re-awakened globe,
Freshly apparelled in her virgin robe
Of morning light and crowned with the sun,
His heart bounds like the light roe from its lair.
And shall it not be thus with me-the trance

Of death once conquered and o'erpast?-Perchance :

I know not, but I cannot all despair.

I have grieved enough to bid Man's world farewell
Without one pang-and let not this be turned
To my disparagement what time my unurned
Ashes lie trodden in the churchyard dell; -

For, is not Grief the deepest, purest, love?

Were not the tears that I have wept alone Beside the midnight river, in the grove,

Under the yew, or o'er the burial-stone,
The outpourings of a heart that overflowed
- With an affection worlds beyond control,
The pleasurable anguish of a soul

That, while it suffered, fondly loved and glowed?
It may be that my love was foolishness,
And yet it was not wholly objectless

In mine own fancy, which, in soulless things,

Fountains and wildwood blossoms, rills and bowers,
Read words of mystic lore, and found in flowers
And birds, and clouds, and winds, and gushing springs
Histories from ancient spheres like the dim wanderers
Whose path is in the great Inane of Blue,

And which, though voiceless, utter to the few
Of Earth whom Heaven and Poesy make ponderers
Apocalyptic oracles and true.

My Fatherland! my Mother-Earth! I owe

Ye much, and would not seem ungrateful now;
And if the laurel decorate my brow,

Be that a set-off against so much woe

As Man's applause hath power to mitigate :

If I have won, but may not wear it yet,

The wreath is but unculled, and soon or late

Will constitute my vernal coronet,

Fadeless at least till some unlooked for blight fallFor, thanks to Knowledge, fair Desert, though sometimes Repulsed and baffled, wins its meed at last,

And the reveil-call which on Fame's deep drum Time's
Hands beat for some lost hero of the Past,

If mute at morn and noon, will sound ere nightfall,
Hard though the struggle oft be which is made,
Not against Power throned in its proud pavilions,
Not against Wealth in trumpery sheen arrayed,
But against those who speed as the Postillions
Of Mind before the world, and, in their grade

Of teachers, can exalt or prostrate millions.
I have said I would not be an ingrate-No!
'Twere unavailing now to examine whence
The tide of my calamities may flow-

Enough that in my heart its residence Is permanent and bitter :-let me not Perhaps rebelliously arraign my lot.

If I have looked for nobleness and truth,

In souls where Treachery's brood of scorpions dwelt, And felt the awakening shock as few have felt,

Aud found, alas! no anodyne to soothe,

I murmur not; to me was overdealt,

No doubt, the strong and wrong romance of Youth.
Less blame I for each lacerating error,

For all the javelin memories that pierce

Me now, that world wherein I willed to mirror
The visions of my boyhood, than the fierce

Impulses of a breast that scarce would curb
One ardent feeling, even when all was gone
Which makes Life dear, and ever frowned upon

Such monitors as ventured to disturb

Its baleful happiness. Of this no more.

My benison be on my native hills!

And when the sun shall shine upon the tomb Where I and the remembrance of mine ills

Alike shall slumber, may his beams illume

Scenes happy as they oft illumed before,
Scenes happier than these feet have ever trod!
May the green Earth glow in the smile of God!
May the unwearying stars as mildly twinkle
As now the rose and jessamine exhale
Their frankincense-the moon be still as pale-
The pebbled rivulets as lightly tinkle-
The singing-birds in Summer fill the vale
With lays whose diapasons never clay!

May Love still garland his young votaries' brows!
May the fond husband and his faithful spouse
List to the pleasant nightingale with joy!
May radiant Hope for the soft souls that dream
Öf golden hours long, long continue brightening
An alas! traitorous Future with her beam,

When in forgotten dust my bones lie whitening!
And, for myself, all I would care to claim

Is kindness to my memory-and to those
Whom I have tried, and trusted to the close,
Would I speak thus: Let Truth but give to Fame
My virtues with my failings; if this be,

Not all may weep but none will blush for me;
And whatsoever chronicle of Good,

Attempted or achieved, may stand to speak
For what I was, when kindred souls shall seek
To unveil a life but darkly understood,-
Men will not, cannot write it on my grave
That I, like myriads, was, a mindless clod,
And trod with fettered will the course they trod,
Crouched to a world whose habitudes deprave
And sink the loftiest nature to a slave,

Slunk from my standard and renounced my God.
They will not, cannot tell, when I am cold,
That I betrayed even once a plighted trust,
Wrote but a single vow in Summer dust,
Or, weakly blinded by the glitter, sold
The best affections of my heart for gold,
And died as fickle as the wind or wave;
No! they will not write this upon my grave.

CONFESSIONS OF HARRY LORREQUER.

CHAP. III.-CALLONBY.

"Away, away, you're all the same,
A flattering, smiling, glittering throng,
Oh, by my soul I burn with shame

To think I've been your slave so long.

"Say you, so Moore-why zounds I thought
That you're experience brought no sadness;
For mine, tho' somewhat dearly bought,
Gives to my heart but joy and gladness."

My first evening at Callonby passed off as nearly all first evenings do everywhere. His lordship was most agreeable, talked much of my uncle, Sir Guy, whose fag he had been at Eton half a century before, promised me some capital shooting in his pre

serves, discussed the state of politics; and, as the second decanter of port "waned apace," grew wondrous confidential, and told me of his intention to start his son for the county at the next general election. Such being the object which had now conferred