For public insult in the streets-before The eyes of the citizens. I'll follow thee Like an avenging spirit I'll follow thee Even unto death. Before those whom thou lovest CAPTIVITY OF POCAHONTAS. Pocahontas was among this people, (the Potommacks;) the reason of her absence from her father's court, is imperfectly afforded by the early historians. Stith con Before all Rome I'll taunt thee, villain,-I'll taunt thee,jectures "it was to withdraw herself from being a wit Dost hear? with cowardice-thou wilt not fight me? (exit.) Cas. Now this-now this is just ! VIRGINIA. Extracts from an unpublished Abridgment of the History of Virginia. BARTHOLOMEW GOSNOLD. This man's memory is closely identified with the history of this country, and his death was a sensible shock to the struggling destinies of Virginia. In the language of one of the historians, "Virginia had its origin in the zeal and exertions of Bartholomew Gosnold." He had early patronised the settlement of the Colony, while it was yet in embryo. He possessed a knowledge of the country not exceeded by any man of his time, which had been acquired by actual voyages to that region; and on his return, to the accuracy of his details of its real advantages, and to the ardor of his speculations upon its brilliant perspective, is mainly to be attributed the revival of the enterprise which had drooped with the misfortunes of Raleigh. The importance of the services of a man like Smith had not escaped his penetration, and he enlisted him in the expedition, by means most likely to engage the attention of an ardent and adventurous mind like Smith's-by opening to him schemes full of enterprise and danger, but full also of the promise of lasting fame. He had been the steadfast friend of Smith in all his persecutions before the Council; and although unable entirely to protect him, his known high standing with the company in England, to which they were all responsible, joined to his moderation and firm ness on the spot, contributed much to assuage their dissensions, and operated as a partial check to the reckless depravity of Wingfield and his creatures. SIR T. DALE. ness to the frequent butcheries of the English, whose folly and rashness after Smith's departure put it out of her power to save them." Probably she had been exiled by the displeasure of her father, for her partiality to the English; or he had confided her to the protection of the neighboring king, to secure her from the dangers of the war in which he was involved with the whites. The temptation of possessing such an hostage as the princess, was too powerful to be restrained, by the few scruples of conscience that arise in the breast of a rude English sailor. Argall seduced Jappassas, by a paltry bribe, and Pocahontas was betrayed by her perfidious host into the hands of the English, to be led into captivity. Power was never yet at a loss for plausible pretexts to palliate its outrage on virtue: policy, expediency, necessity, are the hackneyed themes resorted to, to mitigate the merited reprobation; but the human heart will not be answered so. Insulted, not convinced, by the proffered palliative, it recoils from the false and unnatural subterfuge, and true to its connate suscepti bilities, entertains forever the same sentiment of instinctive abhorrence. As long as the memory of the compassionate Pocahontas shall be cherished by a remote and admiring posterity in Virginia, so long will the unhallowed names of Argall and Jappassas be associated with deep and bitter execrations. DEATH AND MEMORY OF POCAHONTAS. The Princess died at Gravesend, on the eve of her departure for Virginia. The office of her panegyrist is confined to the merest details. The simplest narrative of her life, is the profoundest eulogy to her memory. Born in an age too rude to afford her the precepts and the instructions of virtue, while the condition of her sex seemingly precluded her from opportunities for the display of shining merit, she has yet left examples so signal, that after-times will best evince their progress to refinement, by their successful emulation of her mercy, redeeming and saving from captivity and death--and of her capacious charity, feeding a famishUpon the whole this man's government in the colony, ed people from her hand--and that people a stranger will rather be tolerated upon considerations of its exand an enemy. The eye and the bosom of beauty suf pediency and utility, than applauded for its moderation fused, and throbbing under the compassionate influence and justice-impartiality will assent to the wisdom of of pity-the prostrate attitude—the dishevelled hair— his economy, illustrated by his subversion of the system and the impassioned gaze of Pocahontas suing for the of common stock, by which, without diminishing the life of Smith at the feet of Powhatan-the timid and amount of contribution exacted from the idle, he offered delicate maiden, heedless of the wonted terrors of her inducements and encouragements to the diligent, and sex, rushing to save, through darkness and danger— thus effected the assurance of ample provision, inde- Pocahontas at Ratcliffe's massacre, sheltering in her pendent of the natives--but aggressions upon the char-bosom the head of the boy Spillman, and warding with tered and natural rights of mankind, find willing apolo- her naked hands the glancing tomahawks; these are gists enough among the sycophants and satellites of passages of her eventful life, beyond the efforts of the power, without receiving the sanction of history; and pencil or the pen; and, without the aid of any colorhowever his conduct may be extenuated by the admising in the representation, melt the coldest hearts into sion that his office was rather one of ministry than auacknowledgments of their moral influence and beauty. thority, and that the forbidden power was precedent in the colony, that he rarely resorted to it, and only in extreme instances, there yet remains much to condemn in the adoption of martial law, and much to deplore in the fate of Abbot. JOHN SMITH. History is replete with examples of the vulgar great who have obtained high consideration in the world, by their lucky association with moving incidents, and who, without any intrinsic impulse, have tamely lent them selves to the current of swelling events; nor are the | the heavenly bodics and the little talisman he held in instances rare, although rarely appreciated, of great his hands, the Indian's faculties were absorbed in the virtue and capacity struggling in the tide of adversity, recital, and he remained fixed in an attitude of mute and sinking, not from any defect of their own resources, and vague wonder. but by the depression of their fortune, and who have thus forfeited the world's applause, which awaits rather the prosperous than the deserving. But such is not the estimate of men and events which history owes FYTTE I. Leonore. Why art thou sad? Lover. Sweet Leonore Come hither and list! On their golden shore to posterity; and in transmitting worth to fame, she LADY LEONORE AND HER LOVER. should pay no adulation to fortune. In her discriminating page the character of John Smith will stand conspicuous, unclouded by the obscurity of the times, and the adversity of the events in which he acted and suffered-conspicuous for a constellation of high and shining attributes, such as at once inspire their posses-Yon waters sing. The winds are nigh; sor with the conception of great designs, and qualify him for their consummation. And his claims to reputation will not be tested merely by his achievements, when it is considered that his destinies confined him to a range of action too narrow for his capacity. How unjust to circumscribe his fame to the limits of a colony, whose faculties were capable to remove and extend the confines of empires! His glory dilates itself beyond the sphere to which it had been assigned by circumstances, and lays claim to the merit of any achievement possible to the greatest virtue. CAPTIVITY OF SMITH. Captain Smith was not aware of the stealthy approach of the Indians; a slight wound by an arrow was the first intimation he had of their presence. In this peril, of a nature to quell the greatest courage, because its exercise must be hopeless, his energies did not desert him; seizing his Indian guide, he constrained him to serve as a shield against the missiles of the assailants-and interposing the Indian's person between himself and his enemies, he commenced his retreat in the direction of the canoe; but being obliged to make face to the Indians, his progress was consequently retrograde, and thus not being able to pick his way, he sunk through the ice to the waist in a morass. Here, embarrassed as he was, he slew with his musket three of the Indians, and for several hours kept the others at a distance, until fatigued with his fruitless efforts to extricate himself from the morass, and benumbed by the cold, he desisted from the idle contest. The Indians dared not yet approach him, until he had thrown his arms to a distance from him, when they raised him and carried him to a fire at the canoe, near which lay the dead bodies of his companions. Smith, with the vague intention of gaining time, and of making a favorable impression upon his captors, endeavored to establish a communication with their chief, whom he propitiated by the offering of his pocket compass. The curiosity of the savage was forcibly roused by the apparent life in the vibrations of the needle, the motions of which were visible through the crystal, although it eluded his touch; but when the prisoner, by signs, and so much of their language as he had acquired, engaged his attention to the description of its properties and uses-how, by its indication alone, the solitary hunter could track his pathless way, in darkness, through the deepest forests, and direct his canoe through the expanse of waters to its destined point, and this by mysterious and inscrutable influence between They have swept all cloud from the starry sky; Aye, by my word! Lover. Lover. The stars and the white-armed moon Lover. Wan were the brow and cheek VOL. II.-15 They made her a grave by our love's lone shore, And I laughed in strange mirth, sweet Leonore. Leon. Alas! Lover. Yet a burning and restless pain And anguish-great anguish dogged my step, Would seek my couch most lone and drear, And in my mad dreams, sweet Leonore, I shuddered and moaned-" Pain evermore!" But time wore fleetly on, And the lines were less deep on my forehead wan. Lover. For naught from the book of Time mote blot The strange dream passed- As stole vague fears of a stormy morrow- I spake in the ear of a Lady bright, To gaze on the peerless Leonore. To kiss the brow of his Leonore, But constancy dwelleth not on earth, The cup may be changed for one of sorrow. From one who loved, and then falsely spurned: A poet's thanks for thy courtesy, One fytte is done The preservation of a pure English diction is not sufficiently aimed at in America. Some are so entirely Britannic, as to receive every thing for legal tender in letters, which comes across the water. This is thenceforward duly marqué au coin.' Others are so patriotically republican, as to set about the task of nursing the countless brood of cis-Atlantic words, into literary res pectability. Both are in error. It is not enough to avoid Amercanisms; nor is it expedient to manufacture a pye-bald dialect, of vulgarisms and provincialisms, for the mere satisfaction of calling it our own. In England, no less than here, the language is growing to an unhealthy exuberance, and many of the words which * Wrest was the name of the key used in tuning his harp by the ancient Songleur or minstrel. "Ply my wrest" is an expression to be met with frequently in the early English poets. "Like a bright exhalation in the evening," are fathered on the poor Americans, are distempered | kee acceptation, yet even in America it is confined to a excrescences of the overgrown British trunk. Nothing particular region, where un-English phraseology is rife. but the appeal to a standard of former golden days of So the sad abuse of that poetical word evening to mean literature and classic taste, can save the noble tongue afternoon-an abuse which makes mere prose of such a of freemen from becoming an unwieldy, cacophonious, verse as inconsistent mass of crudities. How much more is there danger, lest the other party, by encouraging unauthorized and American inventions in language, lay the foundation for provincial dialects, which shall hopelessly diverge from one another, until the Mississippian and the Virginian shall be as diverse as were the Athe-narrow circles. No one State or District can justifiably nian and the Macedonian. What this difference was, may be seen at at a glance even in Demosthenes on the crown; where the orator blunders in Attic, while he reads in the same breath a decree of the Byzantes in broad-mouthed Doric. is confined to a 'section' of our states. Mutual recrimination and banter tend to rub off these points of vulgarity, which show themselves most in such as move in throw stones, for we all live in glass houses. We have known a New Englander laugh at the Southern use of the word clever; ignorant utterly that the latter is the only English acceptation. And in like manner we knew a vagrant word-catcher to have in his list of Virginianisms Good bye l'ye, a phrase purely Shakspearian. The Philadelphian calls a certain savoury bird a Quail ; according to Wilson, he is right, and the Marylander wrong in calling it a Partridge. But the Southron makes reprisals in the case of another sort of game, for he rightly calls that a Hare which the North-man eats under the title of Rabbit. To speak of pronunciation would be endless. That of the South accords with England's best orators and dictionaries in all such words as tutor vice toolor—path, wrath, carpet, garden, &c. Yet many sedulous students of Walker never find this out. Dr. Noah Webster would fain have us believe that orthoepy demands such sounds as natur, featur, creatur. We rejoice that even in Connecticut this barbarism is To some minds this may seem a trifling subject; like the countryman's nightingale in Catullus, 'vox et praeterea nihil.' But, as Mirabeau said, Words are things. Language and thought act reciprocally. Unity of speech presupposes unity of thinking; but it also propagates it. Where provincial dialects begin to grow into languages, there is a corresponding divergence of national feeling. In our boundless country, after all our attempts to the contrary, this diversity of language will take place. It is now taking place. We begin to distinguish by his idiom and his pronunciation, the New Englander, the Southron, and the native of the great Western Valley. And there is no possibility of avoiding a separation of greater moment, without some common and acknowledged standard to which the ap-growing into discredit. The learned Doctor would also peal may be made; a standard not fabricated, but adopted-which shall be maintained by men of letters, in opposition to the immensely varying license of the illiterate mass in the respective districts of America. improve English so as to write Savior for Saviour, Bridegoom for Bridegroom, Duelist for Duellist, and the like. We humbly crave leave to wait until any one English work can be produced in which these elegancies shall appear. It is an English, not an American language which we are called upon to nurture and perfect. Let no scholar we shall no longer see such a term as firstly in a work on metaphysics, nor hear such a double adverb as illy on the floor of Congress-no longer hear of an event's transpiring, before it has become public, nor of an argument being predicated on such and such facts. BOREALIS. TO THE WOODNYMPHS. Such a standard exists in the authorized classics of Great Britain. If we depart from this, we not only fall to pieces at home, but eventually sever our litera-deem it beneath his dignity to aid in the work. Then ture from that of the mother country; a mishap to be deprecated by every man who wishes his posterity to drink at "the well-spring of English, pure and undefiled," or who desires our American authors to be honored in Great Britain. We would not be such purists in language, as to stigmatize every word not found in Johnson. There is a fastidiousness on one side, as evil as the recklessness on the other. Fox rejected all words not found in Dryden, and Bulwer speaks of one so addicted to the Saxon element of our tongue, that his English stalks abroad “as naked as a Pict." New objects are discovered in nature, new distinctions are taken in science, new relations are discerned.in ancient truths, and all these justify new words. But we are not in danger of pruning too close in this land of universal license. The purity and melody of our language are threatened from the side of indiscriminate adoption of needless words and phrases. The basest provincialisms begin to install themselves in works of reputed elegance; and grammatical solecisms are daily "being engrafted" on our stock. The last phrase is here inserted as a specimen, with our challenge to all the sciolists and misses who use it, to furnish an instance of a similar construction, in any writer of merit, from Robert of Gloucester to Sir James Mackintosh, Provincialisms are cited abroad as Americanisms. Though "I guess" is often used by Locke in the Yan Ye Nymphs of the woodlands! And the eglantine flowers: By the moon's dewy light- Gush sparkling and bright- And the cool valleys cheered I come where the fountains Their freshness diffuse, Oh! I come to inhale The pure balmy air And the health-breathing gale. And Spring wake her flowers. Charm the valleys with song; To thy cool shady courts, To quaff at thy fountains CRITICAL NOTICES. MRS. SIGOURNEY-MISS GOULD-MRS. ELLET. Zinzendorff, and other Poems. By Mrs. L. H. Sigourney, New York: Published by Leavitt, Lord & Co. 1836. Poems--By Miss H. F. Gould, Third Edition. Boston: Hilliard, Gray & Co. 1835. powers may build up for himself, little by little, a repu tation equally great-and this, too, merely by keeping continually in the eye, or by appealing continually with little things, to the ear, of that great, overgrown, and majestical gander, the critical and bibliographical rabble. It would be an easy, although perhaps a somewhat disagreeable task, to point out several of the most popular writers in America-popular in the above mentioned sense-who have manufactured for themselves a celebrity by the very questionable means, and in the very questionable manner, to which we have alluded. But it must not be thought that we wish to include Mrs. Sigourney in the number. By no means. She has trod, however, upon the confines of their circle. She does not owe her reputation to the chicanery we mention, but it cannot be denied that it has been thereby greatly as sisted. In a word—no single piece which she has written, and not even her collected works as we behold them in the present volume, and in the one published some years ago, would fairly entitle her to that exalted rank which she actually enjoys as the authoress, time after time, of her numerous, and, in most instances, very credi table compositions. The validity of our objections to this adventitious notoriety we must be allowed to consider unshaken, until it can be proved that any multiplication of zeros will eventuate in the production of a unit. We have watched, too, with a species of anxiety and vexation brought about altogether by the sincere interest we take in Mrs. Sigourney, the progressive steps by which she has at length acquired the title of the Poems; Translated and Original. By Mrs. E, F. Ellet. «American Hemans." Mrs. S. cannot conceal from her Philadelphia: Key and Biddle. 1835. own discernment that she has acquired this title solely by imitation. The very phrase "American Hemans" speaks loudly in accusation: and we are grieved that what by the over-zealous has been intended as complimentary should fall with so ill-omened a sound into the ears of the judicious. We will briefly point out those particulars in which Mrs. Sigourney stands palpably convicted of that sin which in poetry is not to be forgiven. Mrs. Sigourney has been long known as an author. Her earliest publication was reviewed about twenty years ago, in the North American. She was then Miss Huntley. The fame which she has since acquired is extensive; and we, who so much admire her virtues and her talents, and who have so frequently expressed our admiration of both in this Journal-we, of all persons are the least inclined to call in question the justice or the accuracy of the public opinion, by which And first, in the character of her subjects. Every has been adjudged to her so high a station among unprejudiced observer must be aware of the almost the literati of our land. Some things, however, we identity between the subjects of Mrs. Hemans and the cannot pass over in silence. There are two kinds subjects of Mrs. Sigourney. The themes of the former of popular reputation,—or rather there are two roads lady are the unobtrusive happiness, the sweet images, the by which such reputation may be attained: and it cares, the sorrows, the gentle affections, of the domestic appears to us an idiosyncrasy which distinguishes hearth-these too are the themes of the latter. The mere fame from most, or perhaps from all other human Englishwoman has dwelt upon all the "tender and true" ends, that, in regarding the intrinsic value of the object, chivalries of passion-and the American has dwelt as we must not fail to introduce, as a portion of our esti- unequivocally upon the same. Mrs. Hemans has demate, the means by which the object is acquired. To lighted in the radiance of a pure and humble faith-she speak less abstractedly. Let us suppose two writers has looked upon nature with a speculative attentionhaving a reputation apparently equal-that is to say, she has "watched the golden array of sunset clouds, their names being equally in the mouths of the people-for with an eye looking beyond them to the habitations of we take this to be the most practicable test of what we the disembodied spirit”—she has poured all over her choose to term apparent popular reputation. Their names verses the most glorious and lofty aspirations of a rethen are equally in the mouths of the people. The one deeming Christianity, and in all this she is herself glohas written a great work-let it be either an Epic of high rious and lofty. And all this too has Mrs. Sigourney rank, or something which, although of seeming little-not only attempted, but accomplished—yet in all this ness in itself, is yet, like the Christabelle of Coleridge, she is but, alas!—an imitator. entitled to be called great from its power of creating in And secondly--in points more directly tangible than tense emotion in the minds of great men. And let us the one just mentioned, and therefore more easily apimagine that, by this single effort, the author has at-preciated by the generality of readers, is Mrs. Sigour tained a certain quantum of reputation. We know itney again open to the charge we have adduced. We to be possible that another writer of very moderate mean in the structure of her versification-in the pecu |