little only to be the sounder when it comes, and the unslumbering fancy revels in unwearied luxury and rears the noblest edifices in her matterless region--pleasant, in short, is castle-building whenever the mind wants renovation, or amusement of its own peculiar character, and can so employ itself without a waste of time or attention from more important objects.

Y. I.

THE LAST LOOK OF GRANADA.

O! the evening sun goes sweetly down
On the old Alhambra walls

At the close of day, when the sunbeams stray
Through the lone and silent halls :

When the shifting gleams of the parting beams
Come softly trembling in,

Through the branching boughs that the myrtle throws,

On the marble floor within.

Where the gilded arches bow'd their heads-
The stars are sparkling through;
The colonnade, where the fountain play'd,
Night freshens with its dew ;-

I see the slow-paced beadsman go
Where the dancer's footsteps flew ;
I hear the knell of the vesper bell
Where the lordly trumpet blew.

And the stream has spread from its dusty bed,
And the fount is waveless there-

And the weeds are rank, where the roses drank
The balmy evening air:

The scrolls that told of the deeds of old

Are voiceless on the wall,

For a hand unseen hath mantled them

In a green and mossy pall.

But a mournful beauty sits above

That greenness of decay

Bright names will shine, though the fane decline,

And the kingdom pass away;

And the orange-blossom breathes as sweet

When the sultry day is done,

And the dews of night as softly light

On the Garden of the Sun."

O! well may the Moorish maiden weep-
And the Moslem's bosom burn,

As he bows the knee, when he prays to see

Boabdel's reign return;

As he dreams of the days, when the torch's blaze
O'er the mazy Zambra shone-

Through these dim halls, where the footstep falls
With a wild unearthly tone.

El Generalife.

'Twas a fearful hour that saw the power
Of the Moslem rent away-

Sad shapes were driven o'er the darken'd heaven
Through the long and weary day.-

The breeze's breath was still as death,
Yet sounds came wandering by,

Like the moan that woods and waters make
When winds are in the sky.

The crescent there shone high in air
When the sun of morning broke-
At the evening hour, from Comares tower
Fernando's trumpet spoke:

Our king comes in, with the music's din
And the victor's proud array;

And one must part, with a heavy heart,
From the city of his sway.

He look'd not round-he spake no sound

He stoop'd not from his pride,

Till his step he stay'd, where the pines o'ershade

The lonely Daro side;

Then he turn'd him back, on his exiled track

He turn'd him once again,

And his eyes they took their last fond look

Of the Paradise of Spain.

They wander'd down, where tower and town
In the yellow moonbeam lay;

Nevada's height look'd out in light

And the white-wall'd Santa Fe;

It slept upon the Vega field

It sparkled on the rill ;—

The stars of night lay calm and bright
In the silver-waved Genil.

But the Christian hymn, from the city dim,

Camie loud

upon

his ear

He heard the shout of the rabble rout

And he could not bear to hear.

He turn'd aside, for he felt the tide

Of tears begin to flow;

2

But the drops came fast, and he wept at last

In the bitterness of woe.

"Farewell! ye towers, and streams and bowers,

A last farewell," he said :

Outspake his queenly mother then

As she raised her stately head:

"Tis well thy part-the coward heart
Should end as it began,

And he may weep, that could not keep
His kingdom like a man.”

G. M.

LAST YEAR.

"See the minutes how they run :
How many make the hour full complete,
How many hours bring about the day,
How many days will finish up the year,

How many years a mortal man may live."-SHAKSPEARE.

EIGHTEEN hundred and twenty-three years have elapsed since the Infant of Bethlehem changed the history of the Universe. If we cast our eyes backward along the stream of time, from the present moment to that eventful æra, what a strange succession of human revolutions crowds upon our vision! The Roman Empire-My dear Sir, exclaims the reader, Gibbon's Decline and Fall occupies of itself twelve goodly volumes, and if you purpose leading us through all the intermediate time, even in the briefest summary, we may come to the end of our days before you will have completed your centuries. Your exordium is too solemn and grandiloquent: what is antiquity to us, or we to it? Time in the wholesale is rather too bulky a commodity for either a writer or reader of periodicals; but if you have any little retail article referring to that portion of it with which we have both been conversant, and which therefore comes home to our business and bosoms-any epitaph, for instance, upon the year which has just expired, we will promise you, provided it be not too much in the lapidary style, (as Dr. Johnson terms it,) to honour it with a resolute attempt at perusal. Contributors to magazines are like actors-" they who live to please must please to live," and therefore, most conditional reader, (for I dare not assume thy retention of that title, if I do not tickle the sides of thine understanding,) I promise to limit our excursion to the three hundred and sixty-five days which our common hobby-horse the Earth has employed in performing his last gallop around the sun.

A foreigner of distinction once asked a British member of Parliament what had passed in the last session;-" Five months and fourteen days" was the reply; and if many of us were asked what we had accomplished in the last year, we might be reduced to the necessity of stating, that we had not only become twelve months older; but that, exclusive of our little terrestrial excursions from London to our country houses and back, we had been travelling round the sun at the rate of fifty-eight thousand miles every hour, and, in the rotatory motion of the earth upon its own axis, had completed an additional five hundred and eighty miles in every similar space of time. So far we have established our claim to be considered as a part of the sublime scheme of creation; but as to any thing that we have performed worthy of an intelligent being, moving in such a magnificent pageant, and obviously framed for the most noble destinies, it is to be feared that very few have reason to be proud of their exploits. Hundreds of thousands are at this moment making up the accounts of the last year, with a reference to their profit and loss, but how many dream of a mental debtor and creditor statement to ascertain the gains or deteriorations which they have experienced in the affections of the heart, or the faculties of the head? or how many calculate their chances in that eternity to which

they are three hundred and sixty-five days nearer than they were at the outset of last year?

Methinks I hear the jingling of sovereigns in the breeches pocket of some warm, portly, and purse-proud reader of Clapham Common or Stamford Hill, as with a complacent chuckle he mutters to himself— "I laid by four thousand six hundred pounds last year"—which he deems a full and triumphant answer to all such impertinent interrogatories. Among a nation of gold-worshipers like the English, bowers of the knee to Mammon, adorers of the glittering deity which Jeroboam set up in Dan and Bethel, I can understand the origin, though I do not recognize the validity of this plea. Nay, it is not difficult to comprehend the gratifications of the professed miser. Nothing is so ridiculous as to pronounce such a man, because his enjoyments differ from our own, to be miserable, in that acceptation of the word which implies unhappiness. His mode of life being his own free election, is a proof of its being the best adapted to his own peculiar notions of pleasure, for no man voluntarily prefers wretchedness. Avarice has been designated the vice of old age; may it not sometimes be its consolation also? When the senses have failed, when the affections are dried up, when there is no longer any intellectual interest in the world and its affairs, is it not natural, that like drowning men, we should grapple at straws; that we should clutch whatever will still furnish us an excitement, and attach us to that busy scene from which we should otherwise sink down into the benumbing torpor of ennui, superannuation, and fatuity? A miser has always an interest in existence: he proposes to himself a certain object, and day by day has the consolation of reflecting that he has made new progress towards its attainment. An old man was lately living in the city, and perhaps still vegetates, who declared that he wished for protracted years, because it had always been the paramount ambition of his soul to warrant this inscription upon his tomb-stone-" Here lies John White, who died worth four hundred thousand consols." Ignoble, sordid, base as this ambition was, it cheered him on in the loneliness and decrepitude of his eightieth year, and is, perhaps, still ministering a stimulant to the activity of his narrow mind. Nor is it a trifling advantage to such men, who being generally worth nothing but money, would, if left to their intrinsic claims, be abandoned to solitude and contempt, that their reputation for wealth procures them friends, flatterers, associates, who watch over them with more than the tenderness of consanguinity, condole with their sufferings, sympathise with them in their successes, submit to their caprices, humour their foibles, and pamper them with presents. Call them, if you will, parasites, plunderers, legacy-hunters: still their good offices are not the less acceptable. If the object of their manœuvres see through their motives, it is a grateful homage to his wealth, an admission of his superiority, a sacrifice to the deity whom he himself adores. If he do not, he affords one more proof, that the great happiness of life consists in being pleasantly deceived. Alas! there are many besides the miser, who would wring their own hearts, if the window of Momus enabled them to discover that of their friends.

But while the money-spinner is endeavouring to sweeten the dregs of life, he is unconsciously embittering death. Unable to take his coin

with him, not even the obolus for Charon, he is only hoarding up a property of which he is to be robbed; for whether he is to be taken from his wealth, or his wealth from him, the result is equally tormenting. Post-obits and reversions, however he may have gained by them after the death of others, will bring him in nothing after his own; so that he will have the mortification of reflecting, that he has been accumulating money, and eking out his life, only to aggravate the pangs of parting from both. Submitting this "trim reckoning" to the consideration of the aforesaid citizen of Clapham Common or Stamford Hill, I would suggest that his four thousand six hundred pounds may not be so all-sufficing an evidence of the beneficial employment of last year, as the jingling of the sovereigns in his pocket may have led him to conclude.

And your Ladyship ?-may I enter upon record that you are well satisfied with the employment of the eight or nine thousand hours of the last year?—“I have at least passed them, sir, in a manner perfectly becoming my rank and station. I have been at every fashionable party of any notoriety; my own routs have been brilliantly attended; my pearls have been all new set by Rundell and Bridge; my Operabox has been exchanged for one in a better situation; it is universally admitted that I dress more tastefully, as well as expensively, than Lady Georgiana Goggle; I have become so far perfect in Ecarte, that though I play more, I lose less, and adverting to this unquestionable proof of improvement, it cannot be said that I have altogether lost my time."Certainly not, madam, you have only thrown it away. I acquit you of its occasional and accidental, in order to convict you of its constant and premeditated misapplication.

Be not alarmed, young lady: it is unnecessary to subject you to the same interrogatory, for those downcast eyes and that half-suppressed sigh sufficiently reveal that you are but ill satisfied with the appropriation of your time during the past year. It is the misfortune, and not the fault of our youthful females, that the artificial and perverted modes of society, as it is constituted in England, condemn them to a perpetual struggle with all the aspirations of nature;-that they are sentenced to a round of heartless dissipation, to be paraded and trotted up and down the matrimonial Smithfield, in the hope of striking the fancy of some booby or brutal lord and master; and that a failure in this great object of their existence, pitiable as it is, embitters the termination of every year with corroding anticipations of waning beauty, and all that silent fretting of the spirit, which gnaws the heart inwardly while it suppresses every external manifestation. Few objects are more distressing than to contemplate one of these garlanded victims, gradually withering like a rose upon its stalk, shedding the leaves of her beauty one by one, and at last falling to the earth in premature decay, or preserving a drooping existence with all her charms and brightness fading utterly away. These are the blooming virgins yearly sacrificed to the Minotaur of Luxury, which, prohibiting all marriages in a certain class of life, that are not sanctioned by wealth, debases one sex by driving it to licentiousness, and dooms the other to become a pining prey to unrequited affections and disappointed hopes.

Never have I been more painfully awakened than when in the dead