Under that porch where she had sat when Heaven
In mercy brought her to that peaceful spot,

She passed again, and the old church

Received her in its quiet shade.

Throughout the whole of the above, only two unimportant words have been omitted-in and its; "granddames" has been substituted for "grandmothers," and "e'en" for "almost." All that remains is exactly as in the original, not a single word transposed, and the punctuation the same to a comma. The brief homily that concludes the funeral is profoundly beautiful.

Oh! it is hard to take

The lesson that such deaths will teach,

But let no man reject it,

For it is one that all must learn

And is a mighty universal Truth.

When Death strikes down the innocent and young,
For every fragile form from which he lets

The parting spirit free,

A hundred virtues rise,

In shapes of mercy, charity, and love,

To walk the world and bless it.

Of every tear

That sorrowing mortals shed on such green graves,
Some good is born, some gentler nature comes.

Not a word of the original is changed in the above quotation, which is worthy of the best passages in Wordsworth, and thus, meeting on the common ground of a deeply truthful sentiment, the two most unlike men in the literature of the country are brought into close proximation.

The following similar passage is from the concluding paragraph of Nicholas Nickleby :—

The grass was green above the dead boy's grave,

Trodden by feet so small and light,

That not a daisy drooped its head

Beneath their pressure.

Through all the spring and summer time

Garlands of fresh flowers, wreathed by infant hands,
Rested upon the stone.

NIAGARA.

The same rhythmic cadence is observable in the following passage, copied verbatim from the American Notes:

I think in every quiet season now,

Still do those waters roll, and leap, and roar,

And tumble all day long;

Still are the rainbows spanning them

A hundred feet below.

Still when the sun is on them, do they shine

And glow like molten gold.

Still when the day is gloomy do they fall
Like snow, or seem to crumble away,
Like the front of a great chalk cliff,

Or roll adown the rock like dense white smoke.

But always does this mighty stream appear

To die as it comes down.

And always from the unfathomable grave
Arises that tremendous ghost of spray

And mist which is never laid:

Which has haunted this place

With the same dread solemnity,

Since darkness brooded on the deep

And that first flood before the Deluge-Light

Came rushing on Creation at the word of God.

To any one who reads this we need not say that but three lines in it vary at all from the closest requisitions of an iambic movement. The measure is precisely of the kind which Mr. Southey so often used. For the reader's convenience, we copy from Thalaba his well remembered lines on Night, as an in

stance:

How beautiful is Night!

A dewy freshness fills the silent air,

No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain
Breaks the serene of heaven.

In full orbed glory yonder Moon divine

Rolls through the dark blue depths.
Beneath her steady ray

The desert circle spreads,

Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky.

How beautiful is Night!

INVOLUNTARY VERSIFICATION IN THE SCRIPTURES.

The hexametric cadence in the authorized translation of the Bible has been pointed out in another portion of this volume. It is very noticeable in such passages as these, for example, from the Second Psalm:

Why do the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing?

Kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together.

The anapastic cadence prevalent in the Psalms is also very remarkable:

That will bring forth his fruit in due season.-v. 6
Whatsoever he doth it shall prosper.-v. 4.

Away from the face of the earth.-v. 5.

Be able to stand in the judgment.-v. 6.

The way of th' ungodly shall perish.-v. 7.

Couplets may be drawn from the same inspired source, as follows:

Great peace have they that love thy law:

And nothing shall offend them.-Psalm, cxix. 165.

Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace

Whose mind is stayed on thee.-Isaiah, xxvi. 3.

When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves,
Ye know that the summer is nigh.-Matthew, xxiv. 32.

UNINTENTIONAL RHYMES OF PROSERS.

The delicate ear of Addison, who would stop the press to add a conjunction, or erase a comma, allowed this inelegant jingle to escape his detection:

What I am going to mention, will perhaps deserve your attention.

Dr. Whewell, when Master of Trinity College, fell into a similar trap, to the great amusement of his readers. In his work on Mechanics, he happened to write literatim and verbatim, though not lineatim, the following tetrastich:

There is no force, however great,
Can stretch a cord, however fine,

Into a horizontal line,

Which is accurately straight.

A curious instance of involuntary rhythm occurs in President Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address :

Fondly do we hope,

:

Fervently do we pray,

That this mighty scourge of war

May speedily pass away:

Yet if be God's will

That it continue until-"

but here the strain abruptly ceases, and the President relapses into prose.

In the course of a discussion upon the involuntary metre into which Shakspeare so frequently fell, when he intended his minor characters to speak prose, Dr. Johnson observed;

"Such verse we make when we are writing prose;

We make such verse in common conversation."

Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, from their habit of committing to memory and reciting dramatic blank verse, unconsciously made their most ordinary observations in that measure. Kemble, for instance, on giving a shilling to a beggar, thus answered the surprised look of his companion:

"It is not often that I do these things,

But when I do, I do them handsomely."

And once when, in a walk with Walter Scott on the banks of the Tweed, a dangerous looking bull made his appearance, Scott took the water, Kemble exclaimed :

:

"Sheriff, I'll get me up in yonder tree."

The presence of danger usually makes a man speak naturally, · if anything will. If a reciter of blank verse, then, fall unconsciously into the rhythm of it when intending to speak prose, much more may an habitual writer of it be expected to do so. Instances of the kind from the table-talk of both Kemble and his sister might be multiplied. This of Mrs. Siddons,—

"I asked for water, boy; you've brought me beer,—”

is one of the best known.

The Humors of Versification.

THE LOVERS.

IN DIFFERENT MOODS AND TENSES.

Sally Salter, she was a young teacher who taught,

And her friend, Charley Church, was a preacher, who praught!
Though his enemies called him a screecher, who scraught.

His heart, when he saw her, kept sinking, and sunk;
And his eye, meeting hers, began winking, and wunk;
While she, in her turn, fell to thinking, and thunk.

He hastened to woo her, and sweetly he wooed,
For his love grew until to a mountain it grewed,
And what he was longing to do, then he doed.

In secret he wanted to speak, and he spoke,
To seek with his lips what his heart long had soke;
So he managed to let the truth leak, and it loke.

He asked her to ride to the church, and they rode;
They so sweetly did glide, that they both thought they glode,
And they came to the place to be tied, and were tode.

Then homeward he said let us drive, and they drove,
And soon as they wished to arrive, they arrove;
For whatever he couldn't contrive, she controve.

The kiss he was dying to steal, then he stole ;

At the feet where he wanted to kneel, then he knole;
And he said, "I feel better than ever I fole.".

So they to each other kept elinging, and clung,
While Time his swift circuit was winging, and wung;
And this was the thing he was bringing and brung:

The man Sally wanted to catch, and had caught—
That she wanted from others to snatch, and had snaught-
Was the one she now liked to scratch, and she scraught.

And Charley's warm love began freezing and froze,

While he took to teasing, and cruelly toze

The girl he had wished to be squeezing, and squoze.

"Wretch!" he cried, when she threatened to leave him, and left,

"How could you deceive, as you have deceft?"

And she answered, "I promised to cleave, and I've cleft."