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With faces darkly veiled, and dew-dropped hair,

And diamond sandals on their gliding feet.

We take our leave of Mr. De Rupe with some regret. If he will permit us to advise him, he should strengthen the powers of his mind by reading and reflection, and he will neither lose his ability in natural description, nor fail when he attempts to express the inward workings of his own mind. Still further, we hope that he will pay more attention to the rules of his art, and not disappoint his well pleased readers by inaccuracies which we cannot but feel he might have easily remedied.

"Poems of Ten Years,"* by Mrs. D. Ogilvy, are chiefly continental. They are full of much earnest and original thinking, and have sprung from a well read and reflective mind. A foreign air which pervades most of these poems, and which is not often enough vocalised by human interest, prevents us from fully sympathising with her as we read. It is a matter of regret that Mrs. Ogilvy has not lived more at home, or at least made her poetry more national. We should like to have seen the bosom of Loch Lomond reflected in her pages. We should like to have scaled the side of Ben Cruachan with her, and felt the norland breeze blow cold and clear, as we stood knee-deep in Highland heath, and watched the deer sweeping through the glens, and the sheep upon the shoulders of a hundred hills.

Mrs. Ogilvy's poems are not mere description; she does not only poeticise the impressions she has received from nature, but gives us the varied thoughts which those impressions have imbedded in her mind. She possesses that peculiar faculty above all characteristic of the poet, which loses sight of the objects which suggested the thoughts, and is absorbed in the train of reflection which has been suggested. In this class of poetry, the great beauty lies in the reader being able to conceive through the thoughts the objects which gave rise to the subjective ideas of the poet. This is particularly the case in a poem called "Strasburg."

Though she is perhaps too much influenced by party spirit, yet in treating subjects connected with the religion of the Roman Catholic church, she does not strike at doctrinal errors so much as at those points in which that church has erred against the liberty of humanity, and the truth of the domestic life. This is well conceived and poetically expressed :

My fancy follows to the cell,
Where oft along the stony floor
The wind sends murmurs of the swell
Which beats far downward on the shore.
That freest voice of earth and air,
Doth it not mock the captive nun?
Will she not sometimes wish she were
A billow dancing in the sun?
Vainly she would her memory steel,
And force her languid thoughts on high-
She is of flesh, and she must feel
We are not angels till we die.

I see a woman on the road,
With naked feet and ragged skirt,
Her shoulders bear a faggot load,
Her horny hands are stained with dirt;
She ploddeth to her fisher home,
Her shingle hut beside the pier ;
Her husband's boat is on the foam,
Himself and all her children dear;
Yet better, worthier to my mind,
To work and love and hope as she,
Than live apart from all my kind,
A lonely friendless devotee.

There is great truth and thought in her descriptions, and these descriptions are generally linked to some fact in the history of life and mind which gives them a twofold interest, and at times they place us at once in the higher realms of speculative imaginations. We quote a few scattered passages:

The wild dream regions lift their countenance On the relaxed and sleep-quiescent limb.

Speaking of Rome,

How different from that blue-eyed shrew,
Keen-blasted Florence, in whose frame
Leaps strength elastically new,
Feeding her children of the same.

And if she weep, it is a storm,
A fury in its vehement gush;
And if she smile, her perfect form
Thrills to the rapture of her blush.

* Poems of Ten Years, by Mrs. D. Ogilvy. London: Bosworth, 215, Regent-street. Edinburgh: John Menzies. 1856.

Looking from Strasburg spire,
The mountain summits slid adown the sky.
And of the true simple women who
"held in gage" the wills and hearts
of the wild lords and captains of
Sforza's and Piccinino's time,

As boulders in St. Gothard's pass,
Along the rapid Reuss,
Rise mossily from out the snows,
Round, isolate, and loose,
And yet are clasped into their place
By a lichen's crimson noose.

Our last quotation must illustrate Mrs. Ogilvy's associative faculty. In the dusty suburbs of London she meets a flock of sheep :

Me a sudden turn surpriseth

With a flock of ewes and rams, Whence a plaintive bleating riseth From their over-driven lambs.

Then I shut mine eyes and follow,

Follow in that bleating wake, And at once the breezy hollow

And the mountains on me break.

With the hidden streamlet springing
Down among the alders low,
With the very same lark singing,

Which we heard there long ago;

And the rocky sheepwalks sweeping
Round the curving waterfall,
And the heart within me leaping,
Leaping faster than it all!

And the heather moor extending
Miles around us as we paused,
And thine eyes upon me bending,

And the blush that gazing caused.

All these memories-sweet, unbidden-
Through my tingling senses run,
Till I nearly am o'er-ridden

By the butcher's blue-frocked son.

If these lines had ended here, they would have been more rounded; but the addition of three stanzas and a simile spoils, if we may be allowed to say so, the unity and beauty of the poem. The stanzas entitled "Dreamers"-"Charon"-" Phantoms”—are

of the same class, and will well repay the reader. "Sultan Ibrahim," which closes Mrs. Ogilvy's book, is full of poetic and reflective thought, and is true to nature and humanity. It is interesting to observe the development of Mrs. Ogilvy's poetic mind through these ten years. The untutored thought and the want of condensation which mark some of her earlier efforts, are replaced by an easy flow and power of reflection in the later poems, without, we regret to say, so much imagination. So it is in life; we never can gain the experience of manhood without losing the innocence of the child; we never can attain to an intellectual excellence without partially at least forfeiting the freshness of early thought. The dew of youth's morning is evaporated by the noon of manhood, and too often descends in the pitiless rain of an evening of grief.

We ceased from our pleasant employ. The evening had fallen grey and cold, but as we glanced out of our window, the moon was sailing in the purple sky. A white halo ringed her, like the glory round the head of a saint, as chaste and cold she moved slowly through the attendant stars. The square panes held her light with joy, and shed it lovingly on the floor, tesselating it with beauty. The fire burnt cheerily; and extinguishing our candle, we lay back in our chair to meditate. On the walls, the old book cases, and the white press, the blaze moved now mirthfully, now sadly, bringing back old thoughts of friends whose figures still held the vacant chairs, and who would sit there ever in the mournful light of memory. The moonlight and firelight mixed friendlily among the books that lay upon the table, and dwelt with a peculiar sweetness on Tennyson and Wordsworth. A fit of flame leaped up, and lit up the guileless face of Jenny Lind, the Queen of Song, and, glancing on, seemed to leap down the open jaws of the tiger's head that hung above the door.

VOL. XLVII.-NO. CCLXXXII.

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AUTUMN was now rapidly coming on, and the green and engrailed oakleaves which had merrily glistened and waved amidst the wood-walks of the Darragh were in the process of transmutation, and were fast becoming gold under the Midas touch of nature's alchemy. The hay was in the haggard, stacked and saved: the great turf-rick had been skilfully and suecessfully piled: the corn-stooks were in the farm-yard or the barn, and the stubble in the field; and most of the country work was at an end.

Unconsciously the days shortened, and the long nights deepened in, and then it was that some of the old agrarian agitation began to revive: the people once more seemed restless and unhappy, and disturbed from their placidity and wonted lightheartedness, and shewed on the surface of their behaviour something like the ground-swell of the sea which so often precedes and heralds in a storm and though the season had been most prosperous, the crops plenteous, and comparatively little distress in the neighbourhood, yet the police were now incessantly employed in tracing out and apprehending offenders; and the cases at the petty sessions, where Mr. Montfort and my uncle were the sitting magistrates, were numerous; and some of them also of a very flagrant description. These misdeeds did not always appear to take their rise either from personal or religious causes; there was some deeper agency at work, whose influence seemed irresistibly to goad the people on, even though it were against their will and better feeling.

Glenmacanass-a Poem.

to

A singular story was told us one day at dinner by M'Clintock, who himself had been an eye-witness to what he now narrated. He was far amidst the hills that morning, laying out grass farms, and was standing at the door of rather a substantial dwel ling-house, which was built over a sloping bank on a wild and solitary mountain road, when rushing down a hill on the opposite side of the gorge, he discovered two figures with streaming garments: a river ran through the valley, which they crossed up their knees, and continuing their race, which appeared straight as a bird could fly, they toiled pantingly up the grassy bank on which M'Clintock was standing, and rushing past him all breathless, they delivered into the hands of the master of the house, Andrew M'Kenna, and his son a lad of twenty, a paper, and a number of straws these latter were hollow, and each having a joint or knot, while on the former was written in a bold round schoolmaster's hand, Run, Run, Run.-Deliver at next house.Bear the straws to the North." men who carried this mystic document were mountain peasants; and on M'Clintock's enquiring from them what they were about, and who had sent them, they affected not to understand his English at all events before they were two minutes in the house M'Kenna and his son had taken the scroll and the symbols with the deepest reverence, and had started up the mountain which rose behind their house, intending, as they said, to leave the straws for further conveyance at a herd of my uncle's, who

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The

inhabited a lone shealing on a sheepwalk just over the shoulder of the hill. "And now," said Mrs. M'Kenna, "if every one runs as fast as my two Andies, the sign will be at Blacksod Bay before the sun goes out of the heavens." These words seeming to argue some complicity on her part with the business, M'Clintock questioned herstraitly, but she assured him she "knew nothing of the sign more than it was asign-nor what the straws meant-nor the writing-nor who had sent them ;" and M'Clintock knew her to be a woman whose word could be relied on. We all professed ourselves totally unable to fathom this mystery, more than surmising that it must have been a dusky development of the agency of some secret society. This was the opinion of Mr. M'Clintock, who understood the place and the people well; he adjudged it to be an experiment to test the willingness and the energy of the peasantry, and by all accounts it proved eminently successful as far as it went.

These things tried my uncle much; he was so anxious to ameliorate his people to see them rise in the moral scale, and become like himself, honest, straightforward, and independentso that all this secret and underhandwork, which his nature detested, accompanied by such frequent breaches of law and order coming continually under his notice as a magistrate, and enforcing on him the necessity of punishment to the transgressors-disspirited him, and saddened the noble and generous nature which it could not embitter. And as if he had not enough of solicitude to weigh upon his mind, another desagrément arose in the development of a new feature in his nephew Gilbert's character.

And this feature was pride.

Of this the cool sagacity of Montfort had warned me before, but I do not think he felt himself at liberty to speak of it to my uncle. Kildoon himself, however, did not leave him long in ignorance on the subject, for about this time he made-after much preliminary fencing, and what Morton called "attitudinizing"-a formal petition to the General, that he would

permit and sanction his change of name from Kildoon to Nugent, as well as assist him with the means to enable him to meet the official costs which might attend this act of cognominal neo-baptism.

His father's name brought with it a bad odour, as the appellation of a man whose evil deeds were still angrily remembered by many whom he had injured, oppressed and robbed. And so, during some of the long previous absences of General Nugent from the Darragh, and when the judges arrived on their circuit at the county town and the grand jury panel was being struck, there was no one found to represent the Darragh property, and its clear unincumbered £5,000 a-year, because, though the owner's nephew was a respectable man, and was living on the property, still he was Mr. Kildoon, and the sheriff, who was an aristocrat, and one of the many who had been plundered by Gilbert's father, would not be induced to place his son among the acknowledged gentry on the grand jury panel of the county of M

Gilbert also greatly coveted the commission of the peace; but in like manner the Lord-Lieutenant of the county, who was a jolly and outspoken old nobleman, said that he "should be slow to recommend for a seat on the bench a man whose father should have been in the dock a hundred times, if chicanery and dishonesty had their due reward."

Thus balked at all sides in his schemes of ambition, and hoping everything from my uncle's kindness of character and generosity, he determined on making this effort to get rid of a name which brought with it so many associations of dishonour, and to assume another, which, from the General's frank and deserved poplarity in the county, was in the inverse ratio of excellency--en bon odeur with all the men in our neighbourhood.

But if Kildoon supposed that his uncle's kindness would at once accede to his wishes, he forgot the old man's great dignity and sense of right, which would not suffer him to countenance

* Some of our readers may remember a circumstance precisely as here stated, which took place about the year 1830 over the whole extent of a remote county in Ireland, and during the space of a single day.

such a proceeding: the General seemed surprised and hurt at his request, and at once extinguished it by a decided refusal.

"I have done much for you, nephew Gilbert," he said. "I am sorry you have compelled me to say so to you or any other man, but this I cannot, will not do ; your name is a good one in itself, and, I have heard, an old one in this country: it has been dishonoured by him who is now gone to his account, let it be your aim to purify it from the association of past evil, and by a continued course of integrity, honour and truthfulness in all your relations of life, redeem its respectability; so that men will be compelled to couple it with all that is excellent and praiseworthy; and you, who bear it, will be a much happier man, and will fill a much higher position in the respect of your neighbours, and the approval of your own conscience, than if you were at the head of our grand-jury roll, and magistrate for every county in Ireland."

The old General spoke this with much firmness, but gentleness, and shaking Gilbert by the hand, he said, "Nephew, dismiss from your head these dreams, which, if realized, would bring you no accession of happiness; and now order my poney, as you go down stairs, and we will take a ride together, and see how the labourers are getting on with the great oak-bark rick they are building in the wood."

My sister witnessed this scene, and when it was over, the General seemed to wish to forget it, and all its etcætera for ever afterwards. Gilbert passed from the apartment with pale checks and purpled ears and eyes that sought the ground. In the hall he encountered Montfort and myself, both of us cognizant of what he had been about, inasmuch as he had made no secret of his intentions; and both of us pretty certain of the result from his downcast and unhappy air. I confess I pitied him, and even Montfort looked out of the window, and whistled as was his wont, withholding, until my cousin was long out of hearing, the scornful laugh which he was too apt to indulge in at Gilbert's expense; and in a day or two the whole business appeared to be as if it never

had been.

Autumn passed pleasantly enough, and we had relays of visitors one after

the other, for my uncle was much

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given to hospitality;” and his preserves and salmon stream, as well as the charms of himself and his very agreeable house brought many visitors. Many of these were county squires, men who had not much education, but could ride well to the hounds in the morning, and drink more wine than they ought in the evening, but this my uncle never permitted at The Darragh." Men with a long Irish ancestry, and a broad Irish accent; some of them spending three thousand a year out of a rent-roll of one-third the amount; a few more careful; most of them, like Jacques' soldier,

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"Jealous of honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,"

and all of them good humoured and kindly spoken fellows, and disposed to suit their habits to those of our free and cheerful, but regular and somewhat drilled house, during their stay with us.

One or two of this class were superior men, and most companionablesuch as Denis Molony-of an ancient stock, pure Celtic, and of an easy fortune, a thorough gentleman and a scholar; one who spoke the Irish language perfectly, and knew its records; an antiquarian, a good musician, a resident and useful landlord, and a religious man; to him my uncle was much attached, and occasionally visited him at his own house, and I may say, thank God for Ireland such men are not rare in the Wild West now. We had a good deal of company also from England-the Trellystons from Devonshire he a tall, full, heavyheaded man, always decorous, and always dull; the wife, an aristocrat by birth, and a sufferer from constitution, for alas the Pool of Plantagenet is often like the Pool of Bethesda, and length of pedigree does not include length of days. The young Trellystons were heavy dragoons, and both quar tered in Ireland, or rather on the soil, being large bodied youths; they fraternized much with Montfort, having a fellow feeling about cheroots, and a tender sympathy on tobacco pipes, but to me they were still just "heavy" -exceedingly-" dragoons," and nothing more. Their sisters were tall, fair, well dressed young ladies, with

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