He

like that, his features and lasting beauties are his own. In his earlier poems, he often reminds you, by the tone and rhythm of his verse, of Campbell and Rogers; but anon, and he has molded his own style into its peculiar and native beauty, and like a river for a while obstructed by rocks and mounds, he at length finds his way into the open plain, and in his full growth and strength goes on his way vigorous, majestic, and with a character all his own. delights in the heroic measure, varying and alternating the rhymes at his pleasure; and in this versification he exhibits a singular breadth of scope, and pours forth a harmony grand, melancholy, and thrilling. Beautifully as he clothes his themes with the pathos and the hues of poetry, they are yet the stern themes of real and of unhappy life. They are, as he tells us, and as we feel and know from our own experience, all drawn from actual knowledge. He finds his fellow-men oppressed by the false growth of society, and he boldly and vehemently lays bare their calamities. He draws things as they are, and with the pencil of a giant. The misery that springs out of the corn-laws, and other measures of monopoly and unjust legislation, he denounces and deplores with unceasing zeal. He assaults and wrestles with the monster growth of injustice with undying and unappeasable hatred. He limns England as it was, and as it is; and asks the aristocratic and the millocrat if they are not ashamed of their deeds? If they do not blush at their philosophy; if they do not recoil from these scenes of woe, and crime, and ferocity, that they have created?

In every form and disguise, injustice and inhumanity"Man's inhumanity to man"

that

"Makes countless thousands mourn," are the monster serpents that he seeks to crush beneath his relentless heel, and to fling forth from the dwellings of men. In delineating the consequences of crime, Ebenezer Elliott

has few equals for masterly command of language. Byron never recorded the agonies of sin and passion with more awful vigor, nor the woes of parting spirits with more absorbing pathos. In the Exile, where two lovers meet in America-in the days when our settlements there were called the plantations, and they were penal colonies,-the woman as a convict, and that through her lover's errors and desertion, nothing can be more vividly sketched than the mental sufferings of both parties, or finer than the scene where the unhappy woman dies in her lover's arms on a night of awful tempest.

"Then with clasped hands, and fervent hearts dismayed,
That she might live for him, both mutely prayed.

But o'er their silence burst the heavy blast;

And, wrapped in darkness, the sky-torrent passed,
And down the giants of the forest dashed;

And pale as day the night with lightning flashed;
And through awed heaven, a peal that might have been
The funeral dirge of suns and systems crashed.

More dread, more near, the bright-blue blaze was seen,

Peal following peal, with direr pause between.

On the wild light she turned her wilder eye,

And grasped his hands in dying agony,

Fast and still faster as the flash rushed by.
'Spare me!' she cried, ‘oh, thou destroying rod!
Hark! 'tis the voice of unforgiving God!

A mother murdered, and a sire in woe!

Alfred, the deed was mine! for thee, for thee,

I broke her heart, and turned his locks to snow.

Hark! 'tis the roaring of the mighty sea!

Lo! how the mountain billows fall and rise!
And while their rage, beneath the howling night,
Lifts my boy's tresses to the wild moonlight,
Yet doth the wretch, the unwedded mother live,
Who for those poor unvalued locks would give
All save her hope to kiss them in the skies!
But see! he rises from his watery bed,

And at his guilty mother shakes his head!

There, dost thou see him, blue and shivering, stand,
And lift at thee his little, threatening hand?

Oh, dreadful!-Hold me!-Catch me!-Die with me!—
Alas! that must not, and it should not be.

No-pray that both our sins may be forgiven;

Then come and heaven will, will, indeed be heaven!"

Among the largest and best poems of Ebenezer Elliott, perhaps the Village Patriarch, the Splendid Village, and the Ranter, will always be the greatest favorites; not because they possess more passion or poetry than the vigorous drama of Bothwell and Kerhonah, but because they depict England as it has become in our day, and awaken our love for both country and people, while they make us weep for the desolation which aristocratic legislation has everywhere diffused. The Splendid Village, unlike the Deserted Village of Goldsmith, has not become released of its inhabitants by the change of times, but has become the scene of heartless wealth, of fine houses, where humble cottages stood, and of purse-proud cits and lawyers, who leave the work-house, or the jail, as the only refuges of the once happy poor. The surly "Constable, publican and warrener," "Broad Jim the poacher," and in the Village Patriarch, the poor old Hannah Wray, whose cottage is unroofed by Mr. Ezra White, the farmer, and who is hanged for killing the savage with a stone, in the act, though it was really done by her half-sharp daughter, are sketches too sadly full of that lamentable life which has, of late years, distorted the fair rural face of England. They are things which can not be too well pondered on by every man who desires the return of better days to this country. But we turn for the present to the more attractive society of blind Enoch Wray.

In Enoch Wray, blind, and one hundred years old, Elliott has drawn one of those venerable village patriarchs, that every one can remember something of in his younger days. Men of hale and well developed powers, who, in a calm life, not devoid of its cares, yet leaving leisure for thought, have cherished the love of nature and the spirit of a pure wisdom in them, worthy of man's highest estate.

Such men, who that has spent his youth in the country, has not known, and has not loved? Enoch Wray is one of these, old and blind, yet with a heart full as that of a child of the tenderness for nature, and the spirit of heaven. The author describes his strolls with him into the hills; and we will take our last extracts from these, because they are fine specimens of landscape painting, and show what a fresh charm the poet confers on his compositions, by the very names of the places he introduces. In this there is a striking difference between him and James Montgomery, Sheffield's other eminent poet, whose writings, beautiful as they are, and full as they are of the love of nature, might have been written anywhere. They do not localize themselves.

"Come, father of the hamlet! grasp again

Thy stern ash plant, cut when the woods were young;

Come, let us leave the plough-subjected plain,

And rise with freshened hearts and nerves restrung,

Into the azure dome, that proudly hung

O'er thoughtful power, ere suffering had begun.

"Flowers peep, trees bud, boughs tremble, rivers run:
The redwing saith it is a glorious morn.

Blue are thy heavens, thou Highest! And thy sun
Shines without cloud, all fire. How sweetly borne
On wings of morning, o'er the leafless thorn,
The tiny wren's small twitter warbles near!
How swiftly flashes in the stream the trout!
Woodbine! our father's ever watchful ear
Knows by thy rustle that thy leaves are out.
The trailing bramble hath not yet a sprout;
Yet harshly to the wind the wanton prates,
Not with thy smooth lips, woodbine of the fields!
Thou future treasure of the bee that waits
Gladly on thee, spring's harbinger! when yields
All bounteous earth her odorous flowers, and builds
The nightingale in beauty's fairest land."

The poet then enumerates the "five rivers, like the fingers of a hand," which so remarkably convene at Sheffield, and then gives one of the most characteristic features of Sheffield scenery, and a graphic notice of that extraordinary body of

men, the Sheffield grinders, who perish early from the effects of their trade, yet pursue it with the most hardy indifference. "Beautiful rivers of the desert! ye

Bring food for labor from the fordless waste.
Pleased stops the wanderer on his way to see
The frequent weir oppose your heedless haste,
Where toils the mill by ancient woods embraced.
Hark, how the cold steel screams in hissing fire!
But Enoch sees the grinder's wheel no more.
Couched beneath rocks and forests, that admire
Their beauty in the waters, ere they roar
Dashed in white foam, the swift circumference o'er,
There draws the grinder his laborious breath;
There, coughing, at his deadly trade he bends;
Born to die young, he fears nor man nor death;
Scorning the future, what he earns he spends:
Debauch and riot are his bosom friends.
He plays the Tory sultan-like and well:
Woe to the traitor that dares disobey

The Dey of Straps! as ratanned tools shall tell.
Full many a lawless freak by night, by day,
Illustrates gloriously his lawless sway.
Behold his failings! hath he virtues too?

He is no pauper, blackguard though he be.
Full well he knows what minds combined can do,
Full well maintains his birthright-he is free!
And, power for power, outstares monopoly !
Yet Abraham and Elliott, both in vain,
Bid science on his cheek prolong the bloom;
He will not live! he seems in haste to gain
The undisturbed asylum of the tomb,
And old at two-and-thirty, meets his doom!

Man of a hundred years, how unlike thee!"

The Abraham and Elliott mentioned here were inventors
of the Grinder's Preservative, which the grinders will not
use !
But of these strange men more anon.

"The moors-all hail! ye changeless, ye sublime,
That seldom hear a voice save that of Heaven!
Scorners of chance, and fate, and death, and time,
But not of Him, whose viewless hand hath riven

The chasm through which the mountain stream is driven !