This has a taste of Milton in it. That metaph of the heavenly familiar is exceedingly beauti It is no wonder that men wrote well who locket upon their art with such religion.

PHILIP.

It reminds me rather of Samuel Daniel's “De fense of Rime," one of the noblest pieces of prose in the language, dignified, eloquent, enthusiastic, and full of rich thoughts, richly clad in the singing robes of choicest speech. —Now let us see how such a man as Chapman would die.

"Let me alone in peace;

Leave my soul to me whom it most concerns;
You have no charge of her; I feel her free:
How she doth rouse, and, like a falcon, stretch
Her silver wings, as threatening Death with death,
Al whom I joyfully will cast her off!

I know this body but a sink of folly;

The groundwork and raised frame of woe and frailty;
The bond and bundle of corruption;

A quick corpse, only sensible of grief;

A walking sepulchre ;

A glass of air, broken with less than breath;

A slave bound face to face with Death, till death:
And what said all you more? I know, besides,
That life is but a dark and stormy night

Of senseless dreams, terrors, and broken sleeps;

A tyranny devising but to plague,

And make man long in dying, rack his death, -
And death is nothing: what can you say more?
I, being
a little earth,
Am seated, like earth, betwixt both the heavens,
That, if I rise, to heaven I rise; if fall,

I likewise fall to heaven: what stronger faith
Hath any of your souls? What say you more?

Why lose I time in these things? Talk of knowledge,
It serves for inward use. I will not die

Like to a clergyman, but like the captain

That prayed on horseback, and, with sword in hand,
Threatened the sun."

JOHN.

Byron's Tragedy.

That is not unlike Byron; but there is a finer and more untrammelled enthusiasm about it than he could rise to without effort. The melody of some verses in it is enchanting. What an airiness, as of the blue, unbounded sky, there is in that passage about the falcon! One feels as if it could not have been spoken but on a lofty scaffold with only the arch of heaven overhead. The whole is very grand, but there is too much defiance in it. It is not so grand as would be the death of one who had learned, with Leigh Hunt, to know that

"Patience and gentleness are power."

The great spirit does not fling down the gantlet/

to Death, but welcomes him as a brother-angel, who, knowing the way better, is to be his guide to his new working-place, and who, perchance, also

led him hither from some dimmer sphere. great good man," says Coleridge, has

"three sure friends :

Himself, his Maker, and the Angel Death."

PHILIP.

"The

You must remember, however, that Chapman's hero was a soldier. Let us read another death

scene:

"Let my death

Define life nothing but a courtier's breath;
Nothing is made of naught; of all things made,
The abstract is a dream but of a shade.

I'll not complain to earth yet, but to heaven,
And (like a man) look upward even in death.
And if Vespasian thought in majesty
An emperor might die standing, why not I?
(One offers to help him.)

Nay, without help, in which I will exceed him ;
For he died splinted with his chambergrooms.
Prop me, true sword, as thou hast ever done :
The equal thought I bear of life and death
Shall make me faint on no side; I am up
Here like a Roman statue; I will stand
Till death have made me marble."

D'Ambois.

JOHN.

This is great, but it is the greatness of a heathen; of one who would, no doubt, maintain an aristocracy in dying, and prefer the traditionary respectability of the axe to the degradation of the cross, and could not be decently choked out of ex

istence but with a cord of silk. For there are those who would carry only the vanities and titles of life out of it with them, and would have a blazon of arms from the Herald's College buried with them, (as the red men do arms of a more serviceable kind,) to be a certificate of admission to the higher circles in the next world. How truly ludicrous, by the way, is this claim of subterranean precedence, this solicitude of epitaphs to be exact in giving their due titles to the deceased, as if the poor ghost were to lug about his tombstone as a visiting-card or a diploma! And if this were the case, how contradictory would some of our titular dignitaries look, (stripped, as they would be there, of all outward appliances,) whose grandeur is determinable by parallels of latitude, and who, though "Honorables" in their own state, may become quite dis-honorable by simply stepping across the border! Would not the shade of a general, for instance, which should come staggering to the gate of immortality under the weight of marble renown piled over his ashes by a grateful country, with such letters of introduction as an epitaph detailing his numerous services would supply, be ranked side by side with that of a Pawnee brave, which should rush whooping in with its equally civilized recommendations in the shape of a string of scalps? It is lucky that we are not taxed to believe the stories which epitaphs tell us, or we should be in despair of the world, thinking that all

the good and great had gone out of it.

er have I wandered in the grave-yard?

But whith

PHILIP.

We have not got Chapman's hero thither yet. Let us hear the last :

"O frail condition of strength, valor, virtue,

In me (like warning-fire upon the top
Of some steep beacon on a steeper hill)

Made to express it! like a falling star,
Silently glanced, that, like a thunderbolt,

Looked to have struck and shook the firmament ! "

We see that the "equal thought" which he imagined that he bore of life or death, in the moment of inspiring exultation at the idea of dying more imperially than an emperor, breaks under him as the earth crumbles away beneath his feet. This must necessarily be the case with all greatness whose sustenance is drawn from the things of this world. It is but a poor weed, which may grow up in that loose, rich soil, in a single night, to wilt and wither as soon. After all, the great secret is, to learn how little the world is while we are yet living in it. It is no hard lesson after we are removed from it, and it looks but like a grain of dim gold-dust in the infinite distance. Every day of our lives we jostle carelessly by a thousand human souls, each one of which is greater and more substantial than this tiny cockleshell of a planet, in which we cruise so securely through the shoreless