Nor did she crown your mutual flame With pledges dear, and with a father's tender name. How in the world, to me a desert grown, Abandon'd and alone, Without my sweet companion can I live? Without her lovely smile, The dear reward of every virtuous toil, What pleasures now can pall'd Ambition give? One would wish to think that Lord Lyttelton was faithful to the memory of his Lucy: but he was neither more nor less than man; and in the impatience of grief, or unable to live without that domestic happiness to which his charming wife had accustomed him, he married again, about two years after her death, and too precipitately. His second choice was Elizabeth Rich, eldest daughter of Sir Robert Rich. Perhaps he expected too much; and how few women could have replaced Lucy Fortescue! The experiment proved a most unfortunate one, and added bitterness to his regrets. He devoted the rest of his life to politics and lite rature. About ten years after his second marriage, Lord Lyttelton made a tour into Wales with a gay party. On some occasion, while they stood contemplating a scene of uncommon picturesque beauty, he turned to a friend, and asked him, with enthusiasm, whether it was possible to behold a more pleasing sight? Yes, answered the other-the countenance of the woman one loves! Lord Lyttelton shrunk, as it probed to the quick; and after a moment's silence, replied pensively-" Once, I thought so!"* Lord Lyttelton brings to mind his friend and patron, Frederick, Prince of Wales, (grandfather of the present King.) From the impression which history has given of his character, no one, I believe, would suspect him of being a poet, though he was known as the patron of poets. He sometimes amused himself with writing French and English songs, &c., in imitation of the Regent Duc d'Orleans. But, assuredly, it was not in imitation of the Regent he chose his own wife for the principal subject of his ditties. In the same manner, and in the same worthy spirit of imitation of the same worthy person, he tried hard to be a libertine, and laid siege to the virtue of sundry maids of honor ; perferring all the time, in his inmost soul, his own wife to the handsomest among her attendants. His flirtations with Lady Archibald Hamilton and Miss Vane had not half the grace or sincerity of some of his effusions to the Princess, whom he tenderly loved, and used to call, with a sort of pastoral gallantry, "ma Sylvie." One of his songs has been preserved by that delicious retailer of court-gossip, Horace Walpole; and I copy it from the Appendix to his Memoirs, without agreeing in his flippant censure. SONG. 'Tis not the languid brightness of thine eyes, That swim with pleasure and delight, * Lord Lyttelton's Works, 4to. Nor those fair heavenly arches which arise Now straying o'er thy forehead, now behind 'Tis not the living colors over each, By nature's finest pencil wrought, To shame the fresh-blown rose and blooming peach, And mock the happiest painter's thought; But 'tis that gentle mind, that ardent love So kindly answering my desire, That grace with which you look, and speak, and move! That thus have set my soul on fire. To Dr. Parnell's love for his wife, (Anne Minchin,) we owe two of the most charming songs in our language; "My life hath been so wondrous free," and that most beautiful lyric, “When your beauty appears," which, as it is less known, I give entire. When your beauty appears In its graces and airs, All bright as an angel new dropt from the skies, jo strangely you dazzle my eyes. But when without art, Your kind thoughts you impart, When your love runs in blushes through every vein; When it darts from your eyes, when it pants at your "There's a passion and pride In our sex," she replied; *Born in Dublin. 1679; died 1717. [heart "And thus, might I gratify both, I would do, Still an angel appear to each lover beside, This amiable and beloved wife died after a union of five or six years, and left her husband brokenhearted. Her sweetness and loveliness, and the general sympathy caused by her death, drew a touch of deep feeling from the pen of Swift, who mentions the event in his journal to Stella: "every one," he says, "grieved for her husband, they were so happy together." Poor Parnell did not, in his bereavement, try Lord Lyttelton's specifics: he did not write an elegy, nor a monody, nor did he marry again; and, unfortunately for himself, he could not subdue his mind to religious resignation. His grief and his nervous irritability proved too much for his reason; he felt, what all have felt under the influence of piercing anguish,—a dread, a horror of being left alone: he flew to society; when that was not at hand, he sought relief from excess which his constitution would not bear, and died, unhappy man! in the prime of life; "a martyr," as Gold. mith tells us, "to conjugal fidelity." CHAPTER XXX. CONJUGAL POETRY, CONTINUED. KLOPSTOCK AND META. THEN is there not the German Klopstock and his Meta,—his lovely, devoted, angelic Meta? As the subject of some of her husband's most delightful and popular poems, both before and after her marriage,—when living, she formed his happiness on earth; and when, as he tenderly imagined, she watched over his happiness from heaven-how pass her lightly over in a work like this? Yet how do her justice, but by borrowing her own sweet words? or referring the reader at once to the memoirs and fragments of her letters, which never saw the light till sixty years after her death?―for in her there was no vain-glory, no effort, no display. feeling so hallowed lingers round the memory of this angelic creature, that it is rather a subject to blend with our most sacred and most serious thoughts, to muse over in hours when the heart communes with itself and is still, than to dress out in words, and mingle with the ideas of earthly fame and happiness. Other loves might be poetical, but the love of Klopstock and his Meta was in itself poetry. They were mutually possessed with the idea, that they had been predestined to each other A |