Day yields her crown to Night, Who now the sceptre wields; And hoar-frost, glancing bright,

Foretells deep snow-clad fields.

The withered trees around,

Blanched in their leafless woe,

The hoar-frost mist has bound
Its winding sheet of snow;
Yon oak tree's stately form
Is bowed as if in prayer,

Praying the coming storm
Its aged limbs to spare.

The gloomy night-clouds weave

A long and heavy pall;

The moon mounts guard at eve

O'er Nature's funeral:

While in the heavenly height,

Bright stars amid the gloom Their watch-fires light by night, Oer' summer's silent tomb.

THE CONDEMNED CELL.

O YE who fondly deem, in youth's bright prime,
That ye can handle vice, and play with crime;
Play with a two-edged scimitar to-day,-
Unscathed, to-morrow cast that blade away,
Before ye lean upon such hope, take heed;

T'will pierce ye through that venom-pointed reed!

And learn that crime, and future vengeance stored,

Are but two endings of the self-same cord

That Vengeance, seeming lame, and slow in flight,

Yet ever keeps the guilty man in sight;

For like his shadow, swift as he, and fleet,

Will Retribution dog his flying feet:

Though deem'd far distant, yet still ever nigh

Her apparition meets his troubled eye,

Long ere his sun of life has sunk beneath the sky!

In London's heart, as in some living tomb,

Go where the convict waits his coming doom,
Who, burden'd with remorse, with shackles bent,
Broods in his lonely cell o'er hours misspent.

With ashy lips, with scarcely bated breath,
He waits the bell that summons him to death.
Above his throbbing heart's wild madden'd beat
He hears the tramp of myriad gathering feet,
The ponderous ringing of the workman's steel,
The heavy footfall of the sentry's heel;

While bounding pulses uncontrolled repeat

Their hurried answer to that measured beat.

His brow he presses, where the fierce thoughts throng, Swelling the veins the life-blood sweeps along;

And thinks how soon shall fail that vital force,

And leave him then a vile dishonoured corse.

No burial rites for him, no friendly care!

And whither shall the spirit wander, where, oh where ? Cold breaks the dawn; the chilly morning air

Bears on its wings the accents of despair.

Hark! for it peals at last that sullen bell;

And living, he must hear his dying knell.

And now the comrade slain in bygone days,
Comes to appal the murderer's haunted gaze:
As imaged clear to Fancy's piercing eye,
Those fix'd wan phantom features terrify
With calm, reproachful look, more dread and fell
Than all the crowd's loud execrating yell.
The signal sounds; he totters to his doom;
While spectral shapes beyond the gibbet loom.
Yet blest Repentance sheds no parting ray ;-
His death the sunset of a sunless day :-
And the dark awful shade of coming woes

A gloomier blackness on the scaffold throws.

His last wild words a curse; and Mercy's door, Now swinging on its hinge, is closed for evermore.

THOUGHTS ON THE GENIUS OF BYRON.

THOU strange and wondrous man! who e'er has climb'd,

Like thee, to such vast intellectual heights,

Yet sunk so deep in sloughs of moral mire?

Thou castedst forth thy plummet o'er the surge

Of human passions' sea, and gauged its lowest depths.

Not like the genial influence of a star,
Bright and benignant, was thy wild career;
But as a comet,-gorgeous in one eve,

Then borne away to realms of outer night.

How strange the medley in that lofty mind!

What kindness oft was there, and what malignant rage!

What generosity, what selfish pride,

What admiration deep for Nature's charms,

What blasphemy to Him who made them all!