when they are absent. The eye is puzzled and confounded with the presence of a beautiful object, and is willing to relapse from an analyzing attention into a vague delight. After the object is withdrawn, the imagination does not recreate, but chooses and arranges from the distinctest images of the memory; and this result, presented again to the eye, is more clear and satisfying than the original vision.

PHILIP.

I am afraid that Chapman's landscapes will look tame and leaden to you, now that your eye has been put out of tune by such brilliant colors. The following verses make one feel as if he had suddenly thrown up the window of a close and dazzling room, and gazed out into the dim, foreboding eyes of Night. Tamyra is expecting D'Ambois, whom she loves unlawfully, at midnight.

"Now all ye peaceful regents of the night,

Silently-gliding exhalations,

Languishing winds, and murmuring falls of waters,

Sadness of heart, and ominous secureness,

Enchantments, dead sleeps, all the friends of rest,

That ever wrought upon the life of man,
Extend your utmost strengths, and this charmed hour
Fix like the centre; make the violent wheels

Of Time and Fortune stand; and great existence
(The Maker's treasury) now not seem to be

To all but my approaching friends and me."

You cannot fail to be struck with the sadness

and silence infused into the first five verses by that

read them to you yesterday, I will quote them

now.

"Men, by their nature, love newfangleness
As do the birds that men in cages feed;

For, though thou night and day of them take heed,

And strew their cages soft and fair as silk,

And give them sugar, honey, bread, and milk,
Yet, just so soon as e'er the door is up,

They with their glad feet will spurn down their cup,
And to the woods straightway on worms to feed."
The Squire's Tale.

"Take any bird, and put it in a cage,

And, though thou hast the forethought of a mage
To foster it tenderly with meat and drink,
And every dainty that thou canst bethink,

And keep it, too, as cleanly as thou may;
Although the cage with gold be never so gay,
Yet had the bird by twenty thousand fold

Be rather in a forest wild and cold,

To feed on worms and such like wretchedness."

JOHN.

The Manciple's Tale.

I love these homely comparisons drawn from the humble tragedies of every-day life. A poet who shoots all his arrows at the stars may chance to hit us now and then, but it is only by good luck. The heart, which is not so nice in its phrase as the intellect, is more likely to be reached by a humbler aim. I never shall forget the blind despair of a poor little humming-bird which flew through the open window of the nursery where I was playing

when a child. I knew him at once for the same gay-vested messenger from Fairy Land, whom I had often watched disputing with the elvish bees the treasures of the honeysuckle by the door-step. His imprisoned agony scarce equalled my own; and the slender streaks of blood, which his innocent, frenzied suicide left upon the ceiling, were more terrible to me than the red witness which Rizzio left on the stair at Holyrood to cry out against his murderers.

PHILIP.

In the poem of "Hero and Leander," begun by Marlow, and finished by Chapman, our poet's lighter qualities are very attractively displayed. There, (as how could it be otherwise in such a subject?) he shows more invention and gracefulness of fancy than anywhere else; there, as he himself says of Marlow, he stands

"Up to the chin in the Pierian flood."

You remember Burns's admirable simile, "Like snow-flakes falling on a river,

A moment white, then gone forever"?

Chapman had used it before him, and with the same application:

"Joy graven in sense, like snow in water, wastes;

Without preserve of virtue, nothing lasts."

Warton and the anonymous editor of 1821 would have Chapman's share in the poem commence later. But I cannot conceive how, with the direct

The following is fine in another way:

"Your Majesty hath missed a noble sight:
The Duke Byron, on his brave beast Pastrana;
Who sits him like a full-sailed argosy

Danced with a lofty billow, and as snug

Plies to his bearer, both their motions mixed.”

Byron's Conspiracy.

Chapman excels in metaphors and similes, and as most of them illustrate his descriptive faculty, I will read a few of them.

"We must use these lures when we hawk for friends,

And wind about them like a subtle river,

That, seeming only to run on his course,

Doth search still as he runs, and still finds out
The easiest parts of entry on the shore,

Gliding so slyly by, as scarce he touched,

Yet still eats something in it."

This is still better:

Byron's Conspiracy.

"And this wind, that doth sing so in your ears,
I know is no disease bred in yourself,

But whispered in by others, who, in swelling
Your veins with empty hopes of much, yet able
To perform nothing, are like shallow streams,
That make themselves so many heavens to sight,
Since you may see in them the moon and stars,
The blue space of the air, as far from us,
To our weak senses, in those shallow streams,
As if they were as deep as heaven is high;
Yet, with your middle finger only sound them,
And you shall pierce them to the very earth.”

Byron's Conspiracy.

The next is worthy of Shakspeare:

"As you may see a mighty promontory
More digged and under-eaten than may warrant

A safe supportance to his hanging brows,
All passengers avoid him, shun all ground
That lies within his shadow, and bear still
A flying eye upon him ;-
-so great men,

Corrupted in their grounds, and building out

Too swelling fronts for their foundations,

When most they should be propped, are most forsaken,
And men will rather thrust into the storms

Of better-grounded states, than take a shelter
Beneath their ruinous and fearful weight;
Yet they so oversee their faulty bases,
That they remain securer in conceit,
And that security doth worse presage

Their near destruction, than their eaten grounds."

Byron's Conspiracy.

The following verses, expressing Byron's conduct when first imprisoned, are very graphic in idea, and have a vast deal of life in the expression. Notice what a hurry and flutter there is in the metre; it jerks impatiently to and fro, as the bird would.

"As a bird,

Entered a closet, which unwares is made
His desperate prison, being pursued, amazed
And wrathful, beats his breast from wall to wall,
Assaults the light, strikes down himself, not out,
And, being taken, struggles, gasps, and bites,
Takes all his taker's strokings to be strokes,
Abhorreth food, and, with a savage will,
Frets, pines, and dies, for former liberty."

Byron's Tragedy.

Chaucer has two passages of which this reminds me, and, as they are very graphic, and I did not