Thy dim eyes tell a tale,

A pitious tale, of vigils; and the trace
Of bitter tears is on thy beauteous face,
Beauteous, and yet so pale!

Changed love! but not alone!

I am not what they think me; though my cheek
Wear but its last year's furrow, though I speak
Thus in my natural tone.

The temple of my youth
Was strong in moral purpose: once I felt
The glory of philosophy, and knelt

In the pure shrine of truth.

I went into the storm,

And mock'd the billows of the tossing sea;
I said to Fate, "What wilt thou do to me?
I have not harm'd a worm!"

Vainly the heart is steel'd

In wisdom's armour; let her burn her books!
I look upon them as the soldier looks
Upon his cloven shield.

Virtue and virtue's rest,

How have they perish'd! Through my onward course
Repentance dogs my footsteps! black Remorse
Is my familiar guest!

The glory and the glow

Of the world's loveliness have pass'd away;
And Fate hath little to inflict, to-day,
And nothing to bestow!

Is not the damning line

Of guilt and grief engraven on me now?

And the fierce passion which hath scathed thy brow, Hath it not blasted mine

No matter! I will turn

To the straight path of duty; I have wrought, At last, my wayward spirit to be taught

What it hath yet to learn.

Labour shall be my lot;

My kindred shall be joyful in my praise; And Fame shall twine for me, in after days, A wreath I covet not.

And if I cannot make,

Dearest thy hope my hope, thy trust my trust, Yet will I study to be good, and just,

And blameless, for thy sake.

Thou may'st have comfort yet;

Whate'er the sou e from which those waters glide,
Thou hast found healing mercy in their tide;
Be happy and forget!

Forget me--and farewell!

But say not that in me new hopes and fears,
Or absence, or the lapse of gradual years,
Will break thy memory's spell!

Indelibly, within,

All I have lost is written; and the theme
Which silence whispers to my thoughts and dreams
Is sorrow still-and sin!

TIME'S CHANGES.

I SAW her ncc-so freshly fair
That, like a blossom just unfolding,
She open'd to life's cloudless air;

And Nature joy'd to view its moulding:
Her smile it haunts my memory yet-

Her cheeks' fine hue divinely glowing--Her rosebud mouth-her eyes of jetAround on all their light bestowing: Oh! who could look on such a form, So nobly free, so softly tender, And darkly dream that earthly storm Should dim such sweet, delicious splendour. For in her mien, and in her face,

And in her young step's fairy lightness. Naught could the raptured gazer trace

But beauty's glow, and pleasure's brightness

I saw her twice-an alter'd charm--
But sti!! of magic, richest, rarest,

Than girlhood's talisman less warm,
Though yet of earthly sights the fairest⚫
Upon her breast she held a child,

The very image of its mother;
Which ever to her smiling smiled,
They seem'd to live but in each other:
But matron cares, or lurking wo,

Her thoughtless, sinless look had banish'd,
And from her cheek the roseate glow

Of girlhood's balmy morn had vanish'd;
Within her eyes, upon her brow,

Lay something softer, fonder, deeper,
As if in dreams some vision'd wo
Had broke the Elysium of the sleeper.

I saw her thrice-Fate's dark decree
In widow's garments had array'd her,
Yet beautiful she seem'd to be,

As even my reveries portray'd her;
The glow, the glance had pass'd away,
The sunshine, and the sparkling glitter;
Still, though I noted pale decay,

The retrospect was scarcely bitter;
For, in their place a calruness dwelt,
Serene, subduing, soothing, holy;
In feeling which the bosom felt

That every louder mirth is follyA pensiveness, which is not grief,

A stillness-as of sunset streaming

A fairy glow on flower and leaf,
Till earth looks on like a landscape dreaming

A last time-and unmoved she lay,
Beyond life's dim, uncertain river,

A glorious mould of fading clay,

From whence the spark had fled for ever!

I gazed-my breast was like to burst

And, as I thought of years departed,

The years wherein I saw her first,
When she, a girl, was tender-hearted-
And, when I mused on later days,

As moved she in her matron duty,

A happy mother, in the blaze

Of ripen'd hope, and sunny beautyI felt the chill-I turn'd aside

Bleak desolation's cloud came o'er me, And being seem'd a troubled tide,

Whose wrecks in darkness swam before me!

THE BELLE OF THE BALL.

IEARS-years ago-ere yet my dreams
Had been of being wise and witty;
Ere I had done with writing themes,

Or yawn'd o'er this infernal Chitty;
Years, years ago, while all my joys

Were in my fowling-piece and filly; In short, while I was yet a boy,

I fell in love with Laura Lilly.

I saw her at a country ball;

There when the sound of flute and fiddle Gave signal sweet in that old hall,

Of hands across and down the middle. Hers was the subtlest spell by far

Of all that sets young hearts romancing: She was our queen, our rose, our star;

And when she danced-oh, heaven, her dancing!

Dark was her hair, her hand was white;
Her voice was exquisitely tender,
Her eyes were full of liquid light;
I never saw a waist so slender;

Her every look, her every smile,

Shot right and left a score of arrows;

I thought 't was Venus from her isle,

I wonder'd where she'd left her sparrows.

She talk'd of politics or prayers;

Of Southey's prose, or Wordsworth's sonnets;

Of daggers or of dancing bears,

Of battles, or the last new bonnets;

By candle-light, at twelve o'clock,
To me it matter'd not a tittle,

If those bright lips had quoted Locke,

I might have thought they murmur'd Litile.
Through sunny May, through sultry June,
I loved her with a love eternal;

I spoke her praises to the moon,

I wrote them for the Sunday Journal.
My mother laugh'd; I soon found out
That ancient ladies have no feeling;
My father frown'd; but how should gout
Find any happiness in kneeling?
She was the daughter of a dean,
Rich, fat, and rather apoplectic;
Cho had one brother just thirteen,

Whose colour was extremely hectic ;

Her grandmother, for many a year,

Had fed the parish with her bounty: Her second cousin was a peer,

And lord-lieutenant of the county But titles and the three per cents,

And mortgages, and great relations, And India bonds, and tithes and rents,

Oh what are they to love's sensations!
Black eyes, fair forehead, clustering locks,
Such wealth, such honours, Cupid chooses
He cares as little for the stocks,

As Baron Rothschild for the muses.
She sketch'd; the vale, the wood, the beach,
Grew lovelier from her pencil's shading;
She botanized; I envied each

Young blossom in her boudoir fading;
She warbled Handel; it was grand-
She made the Catalina jealous;
She touch'd the organ; I could stand
For hours and hours and blow the bellows.

She kept an album, too, at home,

Well fill'd with all an album's glories; Paintings of butterflies and Rome,

Patterns for trimming, Persian stories; Soft songs to Julia's cockatoo,

Fierce odes to famine and to slaughter, And autographs of Prince Laboo,

And recipes of elder water.

And she was flatter'd, worshipp'd, bored,

Her steps were watch'd, her dress was noted

Her poodle dog was quite adored,

Her sayings were extremely quoted.
She laugh'd, and every heart was glad
As if the taxes were abolish'd;
She frown'd, and every look was sad,
As if the opera were demolish'd.
She smiled on many just for fun—

I knew that there was nothing in it;
I was the first, the only one

Her heart had thought of for a minute;
I knew it, for she told me so,

In phrase which was divinely moulded;
She wrote a charming hand, and oh!
How sweetly all her notes were folded!
Our love was like most other loves-
A little glow, a little shiver;

A rosebud and a pair of gloves,

And Fly Not Yet," upon the river; Some jealousy of some one's heir,

Some hopes of dying broken-hearted, A miniature, a lock of hair,

The usual vows-and then we parted. We parted-months and years roll'd by We met again four summers after; Our parting was all sob and sighOur meeting was all mirth and laughter; For in my heart's most secret cell,

There had been many other lodgers; And she was not the ball-room bells,

But only Mrs.Something-Rogra

He

MR. DARLEY is the author of Sylvia or the May Queen, a poem devoted to summer and the fairies; the Manuscripts of Erdeley; Thomas à Becket, a tragedy; Ethelstan, a chronicle; and other pieces, narrative, lyrical and dramatic. He belongs to a new class of writers, of whom we have elsewhere noticed ROBERT BROWNING, and R. H. HORNE. has shown himself to be a true poet, of an original vein of thought, and an affluent imagination. In the preface to Ethelstan, he says, "I would fain build a cairn, or rude national monument, on some eminence of our Poetic Mountain, to a few amongst the many heroes of our race, sleeping even yet with no memorial there, or one hidden beneath the moss of ages. Ethelstan' is the second stone, Becket' was the first, borne thither by me for this homely pyramid; to rear it may be above my powers, but were it a mere mound of rubbish, it might re

main untram led and uns orned, from the sacredness of its purpose." Aside from this object, his works would command respect; but their beau y is marred by an affected quaintness, by novel epithets, and occasional obscurities. His ruggedness of manner, interrupted by a frequent melody of expression, remind us of the old poets, whom he has carefully studied, and well described in one of the richest and most idiomatic specimens of recent prose, his Critical Essay prefixed to Moxon's edition of BEAUMONT and FLETCHER, in which he says, "You find tulips growing out of sandbanks, pluck Hesperian fruit from crab-trees, step from velvet turf upon sharp stubble." No prose or poetry," says a judicious critic in Arcturus, "can be farther from the sonorous school of ADDISON, and nowhere can we find rythmical cadences of greater beauty, than in some occasional passages of DARLEY "

And changed their glittering robes with russet weeds,
And turn'd their sceptres into crucifixes,
And hared their heads of all but tonsured crowns,
And lived out hermit lives in mossy cells,
Or died at Rome on saintly pilgrimage:
Were they not wise?

Eth. Wise for themselves they were!
Edg. Then wherefore not thou for thyself as well?
Wherefore, in thy loved town of Beverley,
Under thy patron saint, canonized John,
As servant dedicate through him to heaven,
Seek not thy temporal rest and peace eterne?
Wherefore withdraw not from the thorny ways
And unreclaimable wilderness of this world,
To the smooth-marbled aisle and cloister trim
Beside us; to these gardens paced by forms
Bland-whispering as their trees, and moving round
Each shrub they tend, softly as its own shadow !
Wherefore retire thee not, wouldst thou enjoy
Calm raptures of ecstatic contemplation,
To yon elm-pillar'd avenue, sky roof'd,
That leads from Minster Church to Monastery.
Both by thyself embeautified, as if
But for thyself? Nothing disturbeth there
Save the grand hum of the organ heard within,
Or murmuring chorus that with faint low chime
Tremble to lift their voices up o'erhigh
Even in God's praises!-Here find happiness,
Here make thy quietary! as thy sister, [sha
Once queen, hath done Wherefore not, thou and

Abbot and abbess, side by side, return
To old companionship of innocence,
Our hearts re-purified at the altar's flame:
And thus let second childhood lead us, lovingly
As did the first, adown life's gentle slope,
To our unrocking cradle-one same grave?

Eth. I could, even now, sleep to the lullaby Sung by Death's gossip, that assiduous crone, Who hushes all our race!-if one hope fail, One single, life-endearing hope

Edg. Dear brother,

[brow, Take hope from my content!-though pale this "Tis calm as if she smiled on it, yon Prioress Of heaven's pure nunnery, whose placid cheer O'erlooks the world beneath her; this wren's voice, Though weak, preserveth lightsome toue and tenor, Ne'er sick with joy like the still-hiccupping swallow's,

Ne'er like the nightingale's with grief. Believe me Seclusion is the blessedest estate

Life owns; wouldst be amongst the bless'd on earth, Hie thither!

Eth. Ay-and what are my poor Saxons To do without their king?

Edg. Have they not thanes

And chiefs?

In that too for his years, and grown by exercise
Of arms, and practice of all manlike feats,-
Which his bent towards them makes continual,
As young hawks love to use their beaks and wings
In coursing sparrows ere let loose at herons,—
Grown his full pitch of stature. Ah! dear sister,
Thy choice and lot with thy life's duties chime,
All cast for privacy. So best! our world
Hath need of such as thee and thy fair nuns,
And these good fathers of the monastery,
To teach youth, tend the poor, the sick, the sad,
Relume the extinguish'd lights of ancient lore,
Making each little cell a glorious lantern
To beam forth truth o'er our benighted age,
With other functions high, howe'er so humble,
Which I disparage not! But, dearest sister,
Even the care of our own soul becomes
A sin-base selfishness-when we neglect
All care for others; and self-love too oft
Is the dark shape in which the devil haunts
Nunneries, monkeries, and most privacies,
Where your devout recluse, devoted less
To God than self, works for his single weal;
When like that God he should, true catholic,
Advance the universal where he may..
You see this penitential garb,
Yet call me best of men?

Edg. It has been worn

Long, long enow! 'Tis time it were put off.
Eth. How soon will he put off his wretched
O Edgitha!
[shroud

Edg. Pour all into my breast!
Thine is o'erflowing!

Eth. No! Unbosom'd pain

Is half dismiss'd. I'll keep my punishe: with me
Press me not! there is a way to crush the heart
And still its aching as you bind the head
When it throbs feverish.

Edg. Have care of that!

There is a way to secret suicide,

By crushing the swoln heart until you kill.
Beware! self-death is no less sinful, given
By sorrow's point conceal'd than by the sword.

Eth. Nay, I am jocund; let's to supper! There A king shall be his own house-knight, and serve See what a feast! we Saxons love good cheer!

[He takes from a cupboard pulse, bread, and water.} Edg. Ah! when he will but smile, how he ca smile!

'Tis feigning all! this death sits on his bosom
Heavily as Night-Mara's horned steed:
His cares for the whole realm oppress him too.
And our book-learned Prior oft draws up
From some deep fountain a clear drop of truth,
Great natures are much given to melancholy.

A SONG FROM ETHELSTAN.

O'ER the wild gannet's bath
Come the Norse coursers!
O'er the whale's heritance
Gloriously steering!

With beak'd heads peering,
Deep-plunging, high-rearing,
Tossing their foam abroad,
Shaking white manes aloft,
Creamy-neck'd, pitchy-ribb'd,
Steeds of the Ocean!

O'er the Sun's mirror green
Come the Norse coursers!
Trampling its glassy breadth
Into bright fragments!
Hollow-back'd, huge-hosom'd,
Fraught with mail'd riders,
Clanging with hauberks,
Shield, spear, and battle-axe,
Canvas-wing'd, cable-rein'd,
Steeds of the Ocean!

O'er the wind's ploughing-field
Come the Norse coursers!
By a hundred each ridden,
To the bloody feast bidden,
They rush in their fierceness
And ravine all round them!
Their shoulders enriching
With fleecy-light plunder,
Fire-spreading, foe-spurnir.g,
Steeds the Ocean!

SONG OF THE SUMMER WINDS.

Ur the dale and down the bourne,
O'er the meadow swift we fly;
Now we sing, and now we mourn,
Now we whistle, now we sigh.

By the grassy-fringed river,

Through the murmuring reeds we sweep;

Mid the lily-leaves we quiver,

To their very hearts we creep.

Now the maiden rose is blushing
At the frolic things we say,
While aside her cheek we're rushing,
Like some truant bees at play.
Through the blooming groves we rustle,
Kissing every bud we pass,-
As we did it in the bustle,

Scarcely knowing how it was.
Down the glen, across the mountain,
O'er the yellow heath we roam,
Whirling round about the fountain
Till its little breakers foam.
Bending down the weeping willows,
While our vesper hymn we sigh;
Then unto our rosy pillows

On our weary wings we hie. There of idlenesses dreaming, Scarce from waking we refrain, Moments long as ages deeming

Till we're at our play again.

THE GAMBOLS OF CHILDREN.
Dows the dimpled green-sward dancing
Bursts a flaxen-headed bevy,
Bud-lipt boys and girls advancing,
Love's irregular little levy.

Rows of liquid eyes in laughter,
How they glimmer, how they quiver!
Sparkling one another after,

Like bright ripples on a river.
Tipsy band of rubious faces,

Flush'd with joy's ethereal spirit, Make your mocks and sly grimaces At love's self, and do not fear it.

A VILLAGE BLACKSMITH. HERE he, your law, vociferous wits, Strong son of the sounding anvil, sits; Black and sharp his eyebrow edge, His hand smites heavily as his sledgeAt will he kindles bright discourse, Or blows it out, with blustrous force; The fiery talk, with dominant clamour, Moulds as hot metal with his hammer. Yet this swart sinewy boisterer, His wife and babe sit smiling near, All fairness with all feebleness in her arms, Safe in their innocence and in their charms.

SUICIDE.

FOOL! I mean not

That poor-soul'd piece of heroism, self-slaughteo Oh no! the miserablest day we live

There's many a better thing to do than die.

THE FAIRIES.

SUFFICE o say, that smoother glade,
Kept greener by a deeper shade,
Never by antler'd form was trod;
Never was strown by that white crowd
Which rps with pettish haste the grass;
Never was lain upon by lass

In harvest time, when Love is tipsy,
And steals to coverts like a gipsy,
There to unmask his ruby face
In unreproved luxuriousness.
"Tis true, in brief, of this sweet place,
What the tann'd moon-bearer did feign
Of one rich spot in his own Spain:
The part just o'er it in the skies
Is the true seat of Paradise.

Have you not oft, in the still wind,
Heard sylvan notes of a strange kind,
That rose one moment, and then fell,
Swooning away like a far knell ?
Listen!-that wave of perfume broke
Into sea-music, as I spoke,

Fainter than that which seems to roar
On the moon's silver-sanded shore,
When through the silence of the night
Is heard the ebb and flow of light.
Oh, shut the eye and ope the ear!
Do you not hear, or think you hear,
A wide hush o'er the woodland pass
Like distant waving fields of grass !—
Voices!-ho! ho!-a band is coming,
Loud as ten thousand bees a-humming,
Or ranks of little merry men
Tromboning deeply from the glen,
And now as if they changed, and rung
Their citterns small, and riband-slung.
Over their gallant shoulders hung!-

A chant! a chant! that swoons and swells
Like soft winds jangling meadow-bells;
Now brave, as when in Flora's bower
Gay Zephyr blows a trumpet-flower;
Now thrilling fine, and sharp, and clear,
Like Dian's moonbeam dulcimer;

But mix'd with whoops, and infant laughter,
Shouts following one another after,

As on a hearty holyday

When youth is flush and full of May;
Small shouts, indeed, as wild bees knew
Both how to hum, and holloa too.
What is the living meadow sown
With dragon-teeth, as long agone?
Or is an army on the plains

Of this sweet clime, to fight with cranes!
Helmet and hauberk, pike and lance,
Gorget and glaive through the long grass glance
Red-men, and blue-men, and buff-men, small,
Loud-mouth'd captains, and ensigns tall.