our adventurer could not resist he foresaw that he should be stripped of his acquisition, which he looked upon as the fair fruits of his valor and sagacity; and moreover, be detained as an evidence against the robbers, to the manifest detriment of his affairs. Perhaps, too, he had motives of conscience that dissuaded him from bearing witness against a set of people whose principles did not much differ from his

own.

Influenced by such considerations, he yielded to the first importunity of the beldame, whom he dismissed at a very small distance from the village, after he had earnestly exhorted her to quit such an atrocious course of life, and atone for her past crimes by sacrificing her associates to the demands of justice. She did not fail to vow a perfect reformation, and to prostrate herself before him for the favor she had found; then she betook herself to her habitation, with the full purpose of advising her fellow-murderers to repair with all despatch to the village and impeach our hero; who, wisely distrusting her professions, stayed no longer in the place than to hire a guide for the next stage, which brought him to the city of Chalons-Sur-Marne.

We know not how it is with others, but we never think of Parnell's Hermit without tranquillizing and grateful feelings. Parnell was a true poet of a minor order; he saw nature for himself, though he wrote a book style; and this, and one or two other poems of his, such as the eclogue on Health, and the Fairy Tale, have inclined us to believe that there is something in the very name of "Parnell" peculiarly gentle and agreeable. Hermits themselves, in poetry, are almost always interesting and soothing people. We see nothing but their brooks, their solitude, and their resignation, their hermitage and their crust; and long to be like them, and play at loneliness.

"And may at last my weary age
Find out the peaceful hermitage,
The hairy gown, and mossy cell,
Where I may sit and rightly spell
Of every star that heaven doth show,
And every herb that sips the dew,
Till old experience do attain

To something like prophetic strain."

So, who does not love Goldsmith's Edwin and Angelina, and the gentle line with which it sets out?—

"Turn, gentle hermit of the dale."

Drayton tears himself away with reluctance from a long list of herbs,

which he describes a hermit gathering, in his Polyolbion. The following are some of the verses. "The Hermit," he says,

"leads a sweet retired life.

Suppose, 'twixt noon and night, (the sun his half-way wrought)
The shadows to be large, by his descending brought,

Who with a fervent eye looks through the twyring* glades,
And his dispersed rays commixeth with the shades,
Exhaling the milcht dew, which there had tarried long,
And on the ranker grass till past the noon-stead hung;"

""Tis then," he says,

"the hermit comes out of his homely cell,
Where from all rude resort, he happily doth dwell;
And in a little maund‡ (being made of osiers small),
Which serveth him to do full many a thing withal,
He very choicely sorts his simples, got abroad.
Here finds he on an oak rheum-purging polypode ;
And in some open place that to the sun doth lie,
He fumitory gets, and eyebright for the eye;
And from the falling-ill by five-leaf doth restore,
And melancholy cures by sovereign hellebore."

But Parnell's hermit is not only a proper hermit, with a for his "cell,"

"His food the fruits, his drink the crystal well;"

" cave"

he is a questioning philosopher. Resigned as he is to Providence, he is not without doubts as to its attributes, occasioned by the sufferings of virtue and the seeming triumphs of vice; and an angel is sent to restore peace to his mind. The way in which this is done, though it does not go into the permission of evil in the abstract (one of the secrets of good, which Heaven seems to keep în reserve for us, in order to enhance the joys of retrospection), furnishes, nevertheless, a far better and more Christian answer, than the assumptions of many a graver authority. It is not Parnell's own. The story is as old, at least, as the Koran, probably a great deal older; and has most likely Turning and winding.

+ Soft. Perhaps in pastoral analogy with milk. + Basket.

Polypodium (Many-foot), a genus of fern.

Cinque-foil-Potentilla (from its medical powers)-a flower of the order

Rosacea,

been told in the languages of all civilized countries. But Parnell's is the most pleasing version of it we know. The undertone of thought and wonder, on the hermit's part, is well preserved; the touches of scenery evince the author's taste for nature; and even the sweet monotony of the versification (so like Pope's, that he has been invidiously said to have had a hand in it), is not unsuitable to the eremetical ground-work of the subject and the lesson of resignation.

Parnell was a gentle clergyman, who with all his inculcations of patience and retirement, found it difficult to reconcile himself to a desolate spot in Ireland, and impossible (it is said) to bear the loss of his wife. We often preach what we cannot practise, not out of hypocrisy, but from opposing frailties and unavailing desire. Parnell admired his hermit the more, because he could not settle down to his solitude and his bin of water. There is a touching passage about him in one of the letters of Swift. Bolingbroke's second wife was like the one that Parnell had lost. The poor poet saw her, for the first time, on a visit at Bolingbroke's house; and when she came into the room, Swift says, he could not take his eyes off her, and seemed very melancholy.

THE HERMIT.

AR in a wild, unknown to public view,

FAR

From youth to age a reverend hermit grew;
The moss his bed, the cave his humble cell,
His food the fruits, his drink the crystal well;
Remote from men, with God he pass'd his days,
Prayer all his business, all his pleasure praise.
A life so sacred, such serene repose,
Seemed heaven itself, till one suggestion rose;
That vice should triumph, virtue vice obey,
This sprung some doubt of Providence's sway;
His hopes no more a certain prospect boast,
And all the tenor of his soul is lost.
So when a smooth expanse receives, imprest
Calm Nature's image on its watery breast,

Down bend the banks, the trees depending grow,
And skies beneath with answering colors glow:
But if a stone the gentle sea divide,

Swift ruffling circles curl on every side;
And glimmering fragments of a broken sun,
Banks, trees, and skies, in thick disorder run.
To clear this doubt, to know the world by sight,
To find if books, or swains, report it right,
(For yet by swains alone the world he knew,
Whose feet came wandering o'er the nightly dew,)
He quits his cell; the pilgrim staff he bore,
And fix'd the scallop in his hat before;
Then with the sun a rising journey went,
Sedate to think, and watching each event.

The morn was wasted in the pathless grass,
And long and lonesome was the wild to pass;
But when the southern sun had warmed the day,
A youth came posting o'er a crossing way;
His raiment decent, his complexion fair,
And soft in graceful ringlets wav'd his hair.
Then, near approaching, "Father, hail !" he cried,
And "Hail, my son," the reverend sire replied;
Words followed words, from question answer flow'd,
And talk of various kind deceiv'd the road;
Till each with other pleas'd, and loth to part,
While in their age they differ, join in heart.
Thus stands an aged elm, in ivy bound;
Thus youthful ivy clasps an elm around.

Now sunk the sun; the closing hour of day
Came onward, mantled o'er with sober gray;
Nature in silence bid the world repose,
When near the road a stately palace rose;