But soon he saw the brisk awakening viol,
Whose sweet, entrancing voice he loved the best.
They would have thought, who heard the strain,
They saw in Tempe's vale her native maids,
Amid the festal-sounding shades,

To some unwearied minstrel dancing;

While, as his flying fingers kissed the strings, Love framed with Mirth a gay fantastic roundLoose were her tresses seen, her zone unbound→→ And he, amid his frolic play,

As if he would the charming air repay, Shook thousand odors from his dewy wings.

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

BY WILLIAM WETMORE STORY

Give me of every language, first my vigorous English, Stored with imported wealth, rich in its natural minesGrand in its rhythmical cadence simple for household employment

Worthy the poet's song, fit for the speech of a man.

Not from one metal alone the perfectest mirror is shapen,
Not from one color is built the rainbow's aerial bridge,
Instruments blending together yield the divinest of music,
Out of a myriad flowers sweetest of honey is drawn.

So unto thy close strength is welded and beaten together
Iron dug from the North, ductile gold from the South;

So unto thy broad stream the ice torrents born in the moun

tains

Rush, and the rivers from brimming with sun from the plains.

Thou hast the sharp clean edge and the downright blow of

the Saxon,

Thou the majestical march and the stately pomp of the

Latin,

Thou the euphonious swell, the rhythmical roll of the Greek; Thine is the elegant suavity caught from the sonorous

Italian,

Thine the chivalric obeisance, the courteous grace of the Norman

Thine the Teutonic German's inborn guttural strength. Raftered by firm-laid consonants, windowed by opening vowels,

Thou securely art built, free to the sun and the air.

Over thy feudal battlements trail the wild tendrils of fancy,
Where in the early morn warbled our earliest birds;
Science looks out from thy watch-tower, love whispers in at
thy lattice,

While o'er thy bastions wit flashes its glittering sword.

Not by corruption rotted, nor slowly by ages degraded, Have the sharp consonants gone crumbling away from our words;

Virgin and clean their edgelike granite blocks chiseled by Egypt,

Just as when Shakespeare and Milton laid them in glorious voice.

Fitted for every use, like a great majestical river,

Blending thy various streams, stately thou flowest along, Bearing the white-winged ship of poesy over thy bosom, Laden with spices that come out of the tropical isles, Fancy's pleasuring yacht with its bright and fluttering

pennons,

Logic's frigates of war, and the toil-worn barges of trade.

How art thou freely obedient unto the poet or speaker When, in a happy hour, thought into speech he translates; Caught on the word's sharp angles flash the bright hues of his fancy

Grandly the thought rides the words, as a good horseman his steed.

Now clear, pure, hard, bright, and one by one, like to hailstones,

Short words fall from his lips fast as the first of a shower—
Now in twofold column, Spondee, Iamb, and Trochee,
Unbroke, firm set, advance, retreat trampling along—
Now with a sprightlier springless bounding in triplicate
syllables,

Dance the elastic Dactylics in musical cadences on,
Now their voluminous coil, intertangling like huge ana-
condas,

Rolls overwhelmingly onward the sesquipedalian words. Flexile and free in thy gait, and simple in all thy construction,

Yielding to every turn, thou bearest thy rider along; Now like our hackney or draft-horse serving our commonest uses,

Now bearing grandly the poet Pegasus-like to the sky.

Thou art not prisoned in fixt rules, thou art no slave to a

grammar,

Thou art an eagle uncaged, scorning the perch and the chain.

Hadst thou been fettered and formalized, thou hadst been tamer and weaker:

How could the poor slave walk with thy grand freedom of

Let then grammarians rail and let foreigners sigh for thy

sign-posts,

Wandering lost in thy maze, thy wilds of magnificent growth,

Call thee incongruous, wild, of rule and of reason defiant; In thy wildness a grand freedom of character find.

So, with irregular outline, tower up the sky-piercing mountains,

Rearing o'er yawning chasms, lofty precipitous steeps, Spreading o'er ledges unclimbable, meadows and slopes of green smoothness,

Bearing the flowers in their clefts, losing their peaks in the clouds.

Therefore it is that I praise thee, and never can cease from rejoicing,

Thinking that good, stout English is mine and my ancestors' tongue.

Give me its varying music, the flow of its free modulation, I will not covet the full roll of the glorious Greek,

Luscious and feeble Italian, Latin so formal and stately, French with its nasal lisp, nor German inverted and harsh. Not while our organ can speak with its many and wonderful voices

Play on the soft flute of love, blow the loud trumpet of war, Sing with the high sesquialtro, or, drawing its full diapason, Shake all the air with the grand storm of its pedals and stops.

THE DESTRUCTION OF SENNACHERIB

BY GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen;
Like the leaves of the forest when autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and forever grew still!

And there lay the steed with his nostrils all wide,
But through them rolled not the breath of his pride:
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail;
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances uplifted, the trumpet unblown.

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!