its own stirring life-blood." Give us more of the objective, urge the readers of this subjective school of song; be less self-conscious, and throw yourself more simply and heartily into the matter of your verse, not as a philosopher, but as a minstrel-not as an anatomist with his dissecting tools, but as a poet, generous, and fervid, and single-eyed analysis is excellent in its way, but poetry is out of its way, and shrivels up beneath its coldly glittering eye. Beauty and passion, as the same Ben Gaultier has said, are like love in the beautiful fable of Apuleius: they die under the scrutiny of prying eyes. There are a few of Mr. Milnes's earliest verses, belonging to the collection entitled Poems of Many Years, which have secured no inconsiderable degree or narrow range of public favor. Foremost among these may be named "The Men of Old," wherein it is finely told how to the simple and strong spirits of olden time, "great thoughts, great feelings came," "like instincts unawares,' and life was a battle whose scheme and scope they little cared to know, content to fight the good fight, and cope, each as best he could, with his confronting foeman : Blending their souls' sublimest needs, And what if nature's fearful wound For that their love but flowed more fast, Not conscious what mere drops they cast happily prompt to count up the privileges rather than to brood over the penalties of his lowly lot: "Tis true I am hard buffeted, Though few can be my foes, But then I think," had I been born- To me men are for what they are, I never mourned affections lent A fine sympathy with the beatings of the It is this very spirit of the simple and the unconscious-it is this very absence of the self-heart in men of low estate, and an eager reoccupied and the minutely reflective, thus hailed and honored in the men of yore, those Sound healthy children of the God of heaven, which is considered the great desideratum in our poet himself. To the same group belong the pleasing stanzas called "The Long-Ago, a retrospective reverie, tender and true; "The Flight of Youth," a monody, pathetic, as befits the theme, but no mere languishing utterance of sickly regrets; "The Lay of the Humble," melodiously warbled by one who can find more than consolation for the oppressor's scorn and proud man's contumely in the sympathies of nature, and who is so cognition of the lofty and the noble in souls engirt by hard circumstances and hampering conditions, is an ever-prominent feature in the poetry of Milnes. A tone of generous humanity, which reckons nothing human as alien from itself, and which is always bent on descrying the latent potentiality through the conventional overgrowth, runs through all his verses. Moral earnestness, a contempt of dilettante existence, a reverent convictionstrong, and practical, and energizing-of the seriousness of life, its grave responsibilities, and its grand but fleeting possibilities, pervade and ennoble his song. His openness of eye and of heart to the sufferings or the wrongs of "those who have none to help them," is genuine, and constantly finds expression, incidental or direct. Take the following lines as an example of this reflective moral strain, so characteristic of his Muse: When Fancy will continually rehearse Some painful scene once present to the eye, 'Tis well to mould it into gentle verse, That it may lighter on the spirit lie. Home yestern eve I wearily returned, Though bright my morning mood, and short my way, But sad experience in one moment earned, Can crush the heaped enjoyments of the day. Passing the corner of a populous street, I markt a girl whose wont it was to stand, With pallid cheek, torn gown, and naked feet, And bunches of fresh violets in each hand. Those luxuries and largess of the earth, Beauty and pleasure to the sense of man, And this poor sorry weed cast loosely forth On life's wild waste to struggle as it can! To me that odorous purple ministers Hope-bearing memories and inspiring glee, While meanest images alone are hers, The sordid wants of base humanity. Think, after all this lapse of hungry hours, Rest on your woodland banks and wither there, Ye are no longer nature's gracious gift, Yourselves so much and harbingers of more, But a most bitter irony to lift The veil that hides our vilest mortal sore. The kindly nature of the man is patent to all his readers, and very winning to those who read him lovingly. "It is impossible," said his friend John Sterling, "for those who know him well not to like him." "Our excellent Richard," adds Sterling's last biographer [Carlyle], "whom all men know, and truly whom none can know well without even doing as Sterling says." We might multiply specimens of that philanthropic earnestness and compassionate sympathy to which we have referred; but space is not the most pliable of conditions. Add, however, the following glowing lines from the Poems of Many Years: A sense of an earnest will If you have no power of giving; A friendly hand to the friendless, But whose echo is endless: A stanza worthy of him whose philosophy it is, that a man's best things are nearest him, lie close about his feet;" and who has few rivals in the art of illustrating the delicate traits of man's heart of hearts-its shy retreats, its inner recesses, the hiding-places of its hopes, and yearnings, and aspirations. There is the contagious warmth of Barry Cornwall's most cordial manner in the next little excerpt, in which metre and meaning, rhyme and reason, pull so well together, in right cheery concord: My own friend, my old friend! In this vein, the poet is rather more engaging than when giving way to that analytical tendency which sometimes comes over him, and overcomes him-or that license of prosaic platitude in which he ever and anon indulges himself more than need be. A malicious critic, who seems to think that Mr. Milnes, in offering the public his Palm Leaves, was only palming sloe-leaves upon them, "cold as a coquette, and matter-of-fact as an apple-dumpling," has said: "I'll rhyme you so by the ell"-more plausibly, as well as more modesty, than Mr. Wakley, who, in quoting Wordsworth's "Louisa" to Her Majesty's Commons, declared his readiness to do that sort of thing "by the mile ;" and in testimony of his faculty in the ell-measure, the aforesaid scoffer has indited what he considers a rather close imitation of Milnes, when Milnes is most literally prosaic, as thus: Sam Rogers kept a shop in Regent Street, These Palm Leaves we evidently owe, in some measure, to the example set by Goethe, in his West-Oestlecher Divan, of composing poems in as much of the Eastern spirit as may be caught by a poet, inured to the modes of thought, and proud of the essential men tend westward, these verses remind us, but the orbs of heaven roll eastward, and, therefore, Let the poet, nature-driven, wander eastward now and then; But it is too bad to judge, as some sweeping censors do, of the poetical powers of Monck-distinctions of the West. The thoughts of ton Milnes by his occasional addiction to prosing. If some of these Palm Leaves are faded, scentless, withered things, there are others fresh with the dew of the East, which is the dew of the morning. We may take exception to the pictures he gives of woman's life in its Eastern phases; but what pleasant touches there are in some of them--what warm, yet chastened coloring! Take a fragment from his sketch of the Harem, or Hareem, as he is careful to spell it; Behind the veil, where depth is traced Behind the lattice closely laced With filigree of choice designBehind the lofty garden-wall, Where stranger face can ne'er surpriseThat inner world her all-in-all, The Eastern woman lives and dies. Husband and children round her draw The narrow circle where she rests; His will the single perfect law, That scarce with choice her mind molests; Their birth and tutelage the ground And meaning of her life on earthShe knows not elsewhere could be found The measure of a woman's worth. Within the gay kiosk reclined, Above the scent of lemon groves, Where bubbling fountains kiss the wind, And birds make music to their lovesShe lives a kind of fairy life, In sisterhood of fruits and flowers, Unconscious of the outer strife That wears the palpitating hours. Who, after pondering these lines, and others -not so rare after all-like these, shall persist in saying, that Milnes is incorrigibly and exclusively matter-of-fact, and lacks the one thing needful to poetry-poetical feeling? We should like to see the plodding prosaist who could "rhyme by the ell," or by any other measure, such picturesque verses as those just cited, equally graphic, suggestive, and calmly beautiful-or others similarly descriptive of the better, perhaps ideal phase, of Oriental womanhood- An idol in a secret shrine, Where one high-priest alone dispels The solitude of charms divine. And in his happiness she lives, And in his honor has her own, And dreams not that the love she gives and there The calm of life comparing with his Europe's busy fate. Let him gladly homeward faring, learn to labor and to wait. 6. It were perhaps a sin of omission, did we omit from even this brief notice some example, however scant in its proportions, of that more purely meditative and high contemplative" style which characterizes a large portion of the poetry of Milnes. To select an illustration at once compatible with the motive of selection, and with the exigencies of limited space, is not easy; but the following significant little series of couplets on Loss and Gain, will probably serve our turn in both particulars its brevity is unexceptionable, and as an exemplification of its maker's matter and manner, it is almost perfect. With it we conclude-first, however, suggesting that the reader who never reads a thing twice, should not read this even once, but skip it altogether; many of this poet's poemetti require a second perusal, this one will repay it. Myriad roses, unregretted, perish in their vernal bloom, That the essence of their sweetness once your beauty may perfume. Myriad veins of richest life-blood empty forth their priceless worth, To exalt one will imperial over spacious realms 542 [Aug., From Sharpe's Magazine. EPIGRAMS AND EPIGRAMMATISTS. THERE is such an easy playful exercise of wit in the epigram; such sparkle, glitter, and surprise in it, if successful, that the employment of these trifles, to amuse their friends, by very sober divines, must not be wondered at. Bearing this in mind, we shall not be surprised at that right reverend prelate Bishop ATTERBURY, making an epigram upon a lady's fan; though we may be glad to hear that the fan belonged "to Miss Osborne, afterwards his wife." Atterbury was the friend of POPE and SWIFT, and seems to have caught some of their grace and wit in turning this epigram, the conclusion of which we shall only quote. The fan, he declares,. "Directs its wanton motions so, That it wounds more than Cupid's bow; We appeal to the reader if this be not very neat for a bishop? But another churchman certainly excels him in wit, if not in compli ments-we allude to Dr. EDWARD YOUNG; a poet whose genius was of so full and pregnant a nature in wit, that in regard to that quality but one name in our whole gallery of poets can come near it, and that name is BUTLER. Dr. Young, before he took orders, danced about the court, and no doubt expected an appointment. But he was a moral, a good, and an earnest man; and every now and then this earnestness showed itself in the midst of The death and sin, as regard leanness and profligacy, come in very well; but the idea of any one mistaking Milton for Voltaire is preposterous even as a compliment. Courtship brightens any one's wits. Young wishes to marry, and pays court to a noble lady whom he afterwards marries, wedding "discord in a noble wife." But at the time of courtship this discord is concord, and the grave poet, playing at bowls with his lady love in the garden at Welwyn is called away by a servant. With a backward glance he departs, sees the visitor, and returns with the following: "Thus Adam goes, when from the garden driven, In the same garden at Welwyn was afterwards erected a statue to Sleep, under which the Doctor, then a married man and wishing for rest, inscribed one of the most beautiful epigrams in any language. It is in Latin; we give the original, and also add a translation for such ladies as have not matriculated at the "Ladies' College." AD SOMNUM. "Somne levis quanquam cutissimæ mortis Light sleep, though death's cold image, prythee Thy fellowship whilst in my couch I lie ;Oh! gentle wished-for rest, how sweet to live Thus without life, and without dɛath to die! a very lax, low church age. Being at a party of literary men he meets with M. de Voltaire, then just arrived in England to mix with the wits, and to show how clever he was. In Young's presence Voltaire ridicules Milton's sublime image of Death and Sin, whereupon the Englishman pencils the fol- its numbers, has escaped us; the point alone lowing: TO VOLTAIRE. The grace of the Latin, the sweetness of is preserved. To quote the whole of Young's epigrams would be to quote the whole of his works: the "Night Thoughts" alone fur nishing more epigrammatic turns than any At once we think thee Milton, Death, and Sin." book in the language. We will, therefore, "Thou art so witty, profligate, and thin, pass on to another churchman, the Rev. Samuel Wesley, a Lincolnshire rector, and father of the celebrated John of that name. He was but an indifferent poet; but the editor of his works, with a sort of wild justice, commits an epigram himself when he declares "that the virtues of his sons, John and Charles, will atone for his poetical crimes." The following is pointed, but, like Young's, depends for its point upon a scriptural simile. It is also faulty in that eighteenth century diction which abounds in "wretches," "creatures," "souls," &c. ON BUTLER'S MONUMENT. "Whilst Butler, needy wretch, was yet alive, No generous patron would a dinner give. See him, when starved to death and turned to dust, Presented with a monumental bust. The Poet's fate is here in emblem shown- These are all we shall quote of Pope, the most polished, the most musical and silvery of our deca syllabic verse-writers; his name not only recalls the host of brilliant wits with whom he was associated, but also that of one of the most courageous, bold, witty, and unwomanly women whom we meet with in literature; and when we have said that, we have said a great deal. Wit, poet, accomplished letter-writer, (and deeply-thinking philosopher, as her last letters to the Countess of Mar testify,) it was perhaps to be expected that our literature should have been enriched by the epigrams of this lady; but, with the exception of the one we quote, we shall not find one passable production in her works. The one usually quoted is not an epigram; but the following is admirable, both for itself, and also for the bitter sneer at the treatment of ladies by their lords. It is entitled A SUMMARY OF LORD LYTTLETON'S ADVICE TO A YOUNG LADY. "Be plain in dress; be frugal in your diet: In short, my deary, kiss me-and be quiet." We must not linger upon the epigrammatists of unknown names and of fugitive poetry books. Those thick old volumes which Tonson indulged in, those miscellanies of verse by "gentlemen of quality and other eminent hands," abound in them. Some are good, some are very bad indeed; we therefore follow our subject to fresh fields and pastures new in the pages of two illus-respect, taking, in fact, a very different theory trious men, POPE and SWIFT. The first was an epigram in himself, and a devoted admirer of them in verse, presuming that verse was epigrammatic. But even his direct epigrams are by no means contemptible, and they have a turn which belongs to them alone. Who does not know that peculiarly insolent one on the collar of a dog presented to his royal highness? "I am his Highness' dog at Kew ; Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?" This, however, seems to be but borrowed; for in Sir William Temple's heads for an essay on conversation, I find the following: "Mr. Grantham's fool's reply to a gentle am man who asked whose fool he was?—I Mr. Grantham's fool: pray, whose fool are you?" " That "upon one who wrote long epitaphs," is true of most performances of that funereal kind; when we recollect that the gentleman addressed was Dr. Robert Friend, the pun on the name gives piquancy to the verse: "Friend, for your epitaphs I'm grieved, Where still so much is said; One half will never be believed, The other never read." Dr. Swift, for whom Mr. Thackeray has such an intense hatred, and we so great a upon the dean's behavior and madness, to that which the greatest novelist of the present day holds, wrote perhaps more epigrams than any literary man of his age or of ours. Like most deep and earnest men, he was at the same time a trifler. It may seem a paradox, but it is true; the dean, as others have done, felt the truth of Horace's maxim, dulce est dessipere ire loco, and, following, invented curious ways of passing the time. He wrote a kind of Dog-latin, which was, when read quickly, nothing but English; he wrote an essay upon punning; advice to servants and characters of the nobility whom he knew. I wish some of those who pride themselves on their birth, would ponder upon the characters which the dean has given to their ancestors. I am travelling out of the way of the epigram in this, but really it is worth the while. It does not show Swift to have been a very goodnatured man; but, as some even of his personal enemies are praised, and that judiciously, by the dean, we may rely upon the general truth, that is, from Swift's view of the case; he was, besides, too proud a man to tell a lie. The remarks I allude to are those upon the "Characters of the Court of Queen Anne," written by a Mr. Davis. Swift appends his epigrammatic remarks to the |