Behold our children as they play!

Blest creatures, fresh from nature's hand;
The peasant boy as great and gay

As the young heir to gold and land;
Their various toys of equal worth,
Their little needs of equal care,
And halls of marble, huts of earth,
All homes alike endear'd and fair.

They know no better! would that we
Could keep our knowledge safe from worse;
So power should find and leave us fre`,
So pride be but the owner's curse;
So, without marking which was which,
Our hearts would tell, by instinct sure,
What paupers are the ambitious rich!
How wealthy the contented poor!
Grant us, O God! but health and heart,
And strength to keep desire at bay,
And ours must be the better part,
Whatever else besets our way.
Each day may bring sufficient ill;
But we can meet and fight it through,
If hope sustains the hand of will,
And conscience is our captain too.

LEIGH HUNT. 1784.

LEIGH HUNT, the journalist and poet, is a son of a clergyman of the Church of England, and was born at Southgate, in Middlesex, October 19, 1784. He received his education at Christ's Hospital, where he continued until his fifteenth year. In 1801, being then clerk to an attorney, he published, under the title of "Juvenilia," the poems he had at various times composed. In 1805, he assisted his brother John in writing for a paper called the "News;" and three years afterward he established, in connection with his brother, the "Examiner" newspaper. This was conducted with great independence and spirit, as well as talent and learning, and very soon took a high rank, and exerted a wide influFor writing, however, with too much freedom against the measures of the government, he was twice prosecuted for libel, but was acquitted. The third time he was not so fortunate; for, when the "Morning Post," in its usual style of fulsome flattery, called the prince-regent, whose character was notoriously infamous, an "Adonis," Leigh Hunt added-" of fifty." Upon so slight a ground was a prosecution instituted against him, and the jury found a verdict of guilty. Leigh Hunt and his brother John were each sentenced to pay a fine of £500, (which with costs amounted to £2000,) and to be imprisoned for two years. Offers were made by the government not to press either penalty, if a pledge would be given that

ence.

no similar attacks should appear; but they were firmly and nobly rejected. Mr. Hunt was not idle in prison; he continued to write and amuse himself in various ways. His independent spirit could not be subdued by such miserable efforts of tyranny, and he proved pretty conclusively that

"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage."

Upon his liberation he continued to maintain the "Examiner" as before at the head of the weekly press. In 1810 he commenced a quarterly magazine called "The Reflector;" but it did not prove successful. Mr. Hunt's chief fame has been won as an essayist, in which character his best pieces are to be found in a collection called the "Round Table," written in conjunction with Hazlitt. His chief works are, "Rimini," an Italian tale in verse; "Classic Tales," "Feast of the Poets," "The Descent of Liberty, a Mask," "The Literary Pocket Book," "The Legend of Florence," "Hero and Leander," "Imagination and Fancy," "Wit and Humor," "Captain Sword and Captain Pen," "A Book for a Corner," 2 volumes, &c.'

FUNERAL OF THE LOVERS IN "RIMINI."

The days were then at close of autumn still,
A little rainy, and, towards nightfall, chill;
There was a fitful moaning air abroad;

And ever and anon, over the road,

The last few leaves came fluttering from the trees,
Whose trunks now throng'd to sight, in dark varieties.
The people, who from reverence kept at home,
Listen'd till afternoon to hear them come;

And hour on hour went by, and naught was heard
But some chance horseman, or the wind that stirr'd,
Till towards the vesper hour; and then 'twas said
Some heard a voice, which seem'd as if it read;
And others said that they could hear a sound
Of many horses trampling the moist ground.
Still, nothing came-till on a sudden, just
As the wind open'd in a rising gust,

A voice of chanting rose, and as it spread,
They plainly heard the anthem for the dead.

It was the choristers who went to meet

The train, and now were entering the first street.
Then turn'd aside that city, young and old,

And in their lifted hands the gushing sorrow roll'd.
But of the older people, few could bear

To keep the window, when the train drew near;
And all felt double tenderness to see
The bier approaching slow and steadily,
On which those two in senseless coldness lay,
Who but a few short months-it seem'd a day-
Had left their walls, lovely in form and mind,
In sunny manhood he-she first of womankind.

Read "Quarterly Review," xiv. 473; "North British,” xiv. 143.

They say that when Duke Guido saw them come,
He clasp'd his hands, and looking round the roo
Lost his old wits for ever. From the morrow
None saw him after. But no more of sorrow.
On that same night those lovers silently
Were buried in one grave under a tree;

There, side by side, and hand in hand, they lay
In the green ground: and on fine nights in May
Young hearts betroth'd used to go there to pray.

TO THE GRASSHOPPER AND CRICKET.

Green little vaulter in the sunny grass,
Catching your heart up at the feel of June,
Sole voice that's heard amidst the lazy noon,
When even the bees lag at the summoning brass,
And you, warm little housekeeper, who class
With those who think the candles come too soon,
Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune
Nick the glad silent moments as they pass.
O sweet and tiny cousins, that belong,

One to the fields, the other to the hearth,

Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strong
At your clear hearts; and both seem given to earth
To sing in thoughtful ears this natural song,-
In doors and out, summer and winter,-mirth.

FLOWERS.

We are the sweet flowers,
Born of sunny showers,

(Think, whene'er you see us, what our beauty saith ;)
Utterance mute and bright,

Of some unknown delight,

We fill the air with pleasure by our simple breath;
All who see us love us,-
We befit all places;

Unto sorrow we give smiles, and unto graces, graces.
Mark our ways, how noiseless

All, and sweetly voiceless,

Though the March winds pipe, to make our passage clear,
Not a whisper tells

Where our small seed dwells,

Nor is known the moment green when our tips appear.
We thread the earth in silence,

In silence build our bowers,

And leaf by leaf in silence show, till we laugh a-top, sweet flowers.

THE AUTHOR IN PRISON.

I papered the walls with a trellis of roses; I had the ceiling colored with clouds and sky; the barred windows were screened with Venetian blinds; and when my bookcases were set up, with

their busts and flowers, and a pianoforte made its appearance, perhaps there was not a handsomer room on that side the water. I took a pleasure, when a stranger knocked at the door, to see him come in and stare about him. The surprise, on issuing from the borough and passing through the avenues of a jail, was dramatic. Charles Lamb declared there was no other such room except in a fairy tale. But I had another surprise, which was a garden. There was a little yard outside, railed off from another belonging to the neighboring ward. This yard I shut in with green palings, adorned it with a trellis, bordered it with a thick bed of earth from a nursery, and even contrived to have a grass plot. The earth I filled with flowers and young trees. There was an apple-treefrom which we managed to get a pudding the second year. As to my flowers, they were allowed to be perfect. A poet from Derbyshire (Mr. Moore) told me he had seen no such heart's-ease. I bought the "Parnaso Italiano" while in prison, and used often to think of a passage in it while looking at this miniature piece of horticulture:

To me thou'rt vineyard, field, and wood, and meadow."

Here I wrote and read in fine weather, sometimes under an awning. In autumn, my trellises were hung with scarlet runners, which added to the flowery investment. I used to shut my eyes in my arm-chair, and affect to think myself hundreds of miles off. But my triumph was in issuing forth of a morning. A wicket out of the garden led into the large one belonging to the prison. The latter was only for vegetables, but it contained a cherry-tree, which I twice saw in blossom.

THE POET'S MISSION.

It is with the poet's creations, as with nature's, great or small. Wherever truth and beauty, whatever their amount, can be worthily shaped into verse, and answer to some demand for it in our hearts, there poetry is to be found; whether in productions grand and beautiful as some great event, or some mighty, leafy solitude, or no bigger and more pretending than a sweet face or a bunch of violets; whether in Homer's epic or Gray's Elegy, in the enchanted gardens of Ariosto and Spenser, or the very pot-herbs of the Schoolmistress of Shenstone, the balms of the simplicity of a cottage. Not to know and feel this, is to be deficient in the universality of Nature herself, who is a poetess on the smallest as well as the largest scale, and who calls upon us to admire all her pro ductions: not indeed with the same degree of admiration, but with no refusal of it, except to defect.

Milton has said that poetry, in comparison with science, is "simple, sensuous, and passionate." By simple, he means unperplexed and self-evident; by sensuous, genial and full of imagery; by passionate, excited and enthusiastic. I am aware that different constructions have been put on some of these words; but the context seems to me to necessitate those before us.

What the poet has to cultivate above all things is love and truth; what he has to avoid, like poison, is the flecting and the false. He will get no good by proposing to be "in earnest at the moment." His earnestness must be innate and habitual; born with him, and felt to be his most precious inheritance. "I expect neither profit nor general fame by my writings," says Coleridge, in the Preface to his Poems; "and I consider myself as having been amply repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me."

As to UTILITY, no man recognizes the worth of it more than the poet he only desires that the meaning of the term may not come short of its greatness, and exclude the noblest necessities of his fellow-creatures. He is quite as much pleased, for instance, with the facilities for rapid conveyance afforded him by the railroad, as the dullest confiner of its advantages to that single idea, or as the greatest two-idead man who varies that single idea with hugging himself on his "buttons" or his good dinner. But he sees also the beauty of the country through which he passes, of the towns, of the heavens, of the steam-engine itself, thundering and fuming along like a magic horse, of the affections that are carrying, perhaps, half the passengers on their journey, hay, of those of the great two-idead man; and, beyond all this, he discerns the incalculable amount of good, and knowledge, and refinement, and mutual consideration, which this wonderful invention is fitted to circulate over the globe, perhaps to the displacement of war itself, and certainly to the diffusion of millions of enjoyments.

"And a button-maker, after all, invented it!" cries our friend. Pardon me-it was a nobleman. A button-maker may be a very excellent, and a very poctical man, too, and yet not have been the first man visited by a sense of the gigantic powers of the combination of water and fire. It was a nobleman who first thought of this most poetical bit of science; it was a nobleman who first thought of it, a captain who first tried it, and a button-maker who perfected it. And he who put the nobleman on such thoughts was the great philosopher Bacon, who said that poetry had "something divine in it," and was necessary to the satisfaction of the human mind.