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LETTER CVII.

To the Rev. J. Altport.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

I Cottage.

WHAT shall I say? How shall I begm to utter thanks for such unlooked for exertions my poor in my favour, and so often repeated? All language is useless; for I can say nothing that will any way paint in its celestial colours your unutterable kindness,—nothing that can fully expres my gratitude for your truly Samaritan compassion to the distressed and wretched. Be silent, then, my heart; for silence here may be eloquent and expressive.

Before I informed you of my hopeless misery, (for I could not quit this place and not acquaint you with it, though I wrote without the most distant expectation of your being able to effect anything more on my behalf), I had spoken to a broker in a neighbouring town to come to the cottage, and take the little all that I possessed in the world. The evening prior to his intended arrival came down upon me in double darkness

and anguish, and I sat absorbed in the deepest melancholy, repining at my bitter fate. Already I saw my dear-loved habitation stripped of every thing, and the walls appeared in naked desolation before me. Already I saw those things to which I had so long been used and attached, (for there is scarcely one I possess to which some little tale of simple interest does not extend), in the hands of strangers and accounted as nothing, or trifles not worth a thought. I saw my books, so valued and beloved, torn from me; my British relics of antiquity cast away in scorn; and myself driven forth, with my wife and child, to wander heartbroken through an unfeeling world, to seek a home among strangers I knew not where!

And O, how much was the anguish of that gloomy hour increased by the thoughts of what my aged and widowed mother would feel at our sad parting! For with her weight of years, it was impossible she could go with us and quit the village where she had always resided, to accompany a houseless wanderer. To reflect on the tears that she would shed, when compelled to bid her a long and perhaps an eternal farewell; to leave her desolate and forlorn, without one dear relative nigh to soothe her last sad days, and render those kind attentions so necessary to her comfort when my little boy,—the child in whom

her life seems bound up,-was to imprint his last kiss on her grief-worn and faded cheek, when her dim eyes, made still dimmer by gushing floods of sorrow, would watch our evanescent forms as we departed from her till she could behold us no more, and then return heart-broken to her cheerless and lonely habitation :-0, to think of this, was indeed the bitterness of grief, and swallowed up all thoughts of my own future destiny.

In that dark hour of inexpressible anguish,

came most unexpectedly your kind consoling letter, with its valued contents. It was a gleam of brightness from Heaven, shot through the unpitying tempest which had laid me prostrate! It spoke of comfort, hope, and future bliss! O, that I could at that moment of almost delirious joy have knelt at your feet, bathed your hand with my scalding tears, and blessed you a thousand and a thousand times for such undreamt-of salvation from unutterable wretchedness: for my home, my books, my dear, dear parent, all, all were spared me a little longer, and I felt blest indeed!

I send you the following lines, expressive of my feelings on the evening I received your letter, and remain, my dear sir,

Your ever grateful

SYLVATICUS.

AN ADIEU TO HOME.

FAREWELL, dear home! a sad, a last farewell! O, had we sundered in a brighter hour,

Thou wouldst have claimed a tear of fond regret :
But now to quit thee! from thy lowly roof
To wander through the inhospitable world
I know not where, and never see thee more,-
Like the poor sea-boy, tossed without or helm
Or compass on the storm-devoted surge
Of some wild unknown sea,-O, 'tis indeed
A parting deep of anguish !

Dear-loved home!

Thou through the midnight gloom and tempest-hour
When, shaken by the gusts the reeling woods,
That round thee spread their winter-ravaged arms
To shelter and protect, outroared the voice
Of the deep thunder-swell, didst from the rage
Of battling elements enshield my head,
And to my storm-rocked slumbers kindly give
Security and comfort: when the winds,
Those vagrant minstrels of the evening, sung
Round thy closed doors their melancholy song,
And their shrill whistle at the casement came
Full of sad melody, far from the world
And all its heartless splendours, O, how sweet
It was beside thy flame-lit hearth to hold
Communion with the maids of Helicon !

O, they have from Parnassian woods, and hills,
And classic founts of inspiration come
To visit me, gliding like radiant clouds

That float in sunset

pomp along the west Around my seat; till like Philemon's cot

Thy lowly roof and clay-built walls all seemed
To pillars of opal, gold, and gems transformed.

Sheaves of sweet-smelling blossoms showered they there,
And hung thy gorgeous beams with rich-hued wreaths;
Castalian roses, which on the green brim

Of Inspiration's stream bloomed in the eye
Of music-loving Phoebus; violets sweet
That lurk amid the Paphian bowers of love,
And Venus gathers when the dews impearl
Their purple leaves, to scatter o'er her couch;
The bright blood-tinged Adonis, and that flower
Of deepest gold which o'er the Muses' fount
Leans doating on its image in the wave;
Myrtles begemmed with coral buds and bloom
Of snowy tint, and greener hued than those
With which Calypso bound the raven locks
Of her captive warrior in her sea-girt isle ;
The blowing jessamine and asphodel,
Which in the grove of Daphne drink the dews
From laughing-eyed Aurora's balmy urn,
And those empurpled buds Apollo loves,
That from sweet Hyacinthus' life-drops sprung,
With golden fruits delicious, thyme, and myrrh,
Brought from the gardens of the Hesperides ;
These, and a thousand flowers more beautiful
Than e'en Proserpine's virgins from their hands
Affrighted flung in Enna's roseate fields,
When gloomy Pluto to his Stygian realms
Triumphant bore her in his iron grasp,