Sweeter in all the strains of love
The language of thy turtle dove

Paired to thy swelling chord ;
Sweeter with every grace endued
The glory of thy gratitude

Respired unto the Lord.

Strong is the horse upon his speed;
Strong in pursuit the rapid glede,'

Which makes at once his game : Strong the tall ostrich on the ground; Strong thro’ the turbulent profound

Shoots xiphias ? to his aim.

Strong is the lion-like a coal
His eyeball-like a bastion's mole

His chest against the foes ;
Strong, the gier-eagle on his sail,
Strong against tide th' enormous whale

Emerges as he goes.

But stronger still, in earth and air,
And in the sea, the man of prayer ,

And far beneath the tide ;
And in the seat to faith assigned,
Where ask is have, where seek is find,

Where knock is open wide.

Beauteous the fleet before the gale ;
Beauteous the multitudes in mail,

Ranked arms and crested heads : Beauteous the garden's umbrage mild, Walk, water, meditated wild,

And all the bloomy beds.

Beauteous the moon full on the lawn ;
And beauteous, when the veil's withdrawn,

The virgin to her spouse :
Beauteous the temple decked and filled,
When to the heaven of heavens they build

Their heart-directed vows.

Beauteous, yea beauteous more than these, The shepherd-king upon his knees

For his momentous trust; With wish of infinite conceit, For man, beast, mute, the small and great,

And prostrate dust to dust.

Precious the bounteous widow's mite;
And precious, for extreme delight,

The largess from the churl :
Precious the ruby's blushing blaze,
And alba's blest imperial rays,

And pure cerulean pearl.

Precious the penitential tear ;
And precious is the sigh sincere,

Acceptable to God :
And precious are the winning flowers,
In gladsome Israel's feast of bowers,

Bound on the hallowed sod.

More precious that diviner part
Of David, even the Lord's own heart,

Great, beautiful, and new ;
In all things where it was intent,
In all extremes, in each event

Proof-answering true to true.

Glorious the sun in mid career ;
Glorious th' assembled fires appear ;

Glorious the comet's train :
Glorious the trumpet and alarm ;
Glorious th' almighty stretched-out arm ;

Glorious th' enraptured main :

22

Glorious piorthern lights astream; Glorious the sous, God's the theme ;

Glorious the thunder's roar : Glorious hosanna from the den ; Glorious the catholic amen;

Glorious the martyr's gore :

Glorious--more glorious is the crown
Of Him that brought salvation down,

By meekness callid thy Son;
Thou at stupendous truth believed,
And now the matchless deed's achieved,

Determined, dared, and done.

WILLIAM FALCONER.

[BORN 11th of February, 1732 ; lost with the crew of the Aurora, last heard of on 27th December, 1769, at the Cape of Good Hope. The Shipwreck was published in 1762.)

In the Gentleman's Magazine for December, 1755, appeared a versified complaint, On the Uncommon Scarcity of Poetry, by a Sailor. The scarcity still prevailed when seven years later a sailor—the same perhaps who had written the complaint-startled English readers by his discovery of a new epic theme. The Muse, as Falconer imagines her, visits him in no olive-grove, or flowery lawn, but in a glimmering cavern beside the sea ; his lyre is tuned to

• The long surge that foams through yonder cave,

Whose vaults remurmur to the roaring wave.' There was largeness, and freedom and force in the subject he had chosen ; and what is best in his treatment of it was learnt direct from the waves and winds. No one before Falconer had conceived or told in English poetry the long and passionate combat between the sea, roused to fury, and its slight but dextersus rival, with the varying fortunes of the strife. He had himselt, like his Arion, been wrecked near Cape Colonna, on the coast of Greece ; like Arion, he was one of three who reached the shore and lived. For the material of his brief epic he needed but to revive in his imagination the sights, the sounds, the fears, the hopes, the efforts of five days the most eventful and the most vivid of his life. The Shipwreck is not a descriptive poem ; it is a poem of action ; each buffet of the sea, each swift turning of the wheel 15 a portion of the attack or the defence; and as the catastrophe draws near, as the ship scuds past Falconera, as the hills of Greece rise to view, as the pitiless cliffs of St. George grow clear, and the sound of the breakers is heard, the action of the poem increases in swiftness and intensity.

Falconer was a skilful seaman ; unhappily he was not a great poct. The reality, the unity, the largeness of his theme lend him support; and he is a faithful and energetic narrator. But the spirits of tempest and of night needed for their interpreter one of stiunger and subtler speech than Falconer. Nor was it possible to render into orderly couplets after Pope the vast cadences, the difficult phrases of ocean. The poet's diction is the artificial diction of eighteenth-century verse, handled with none of that exquisite art shown by some cultured writers of the time. And into the midst of the commonplace poetic vocabulary bounces suddenly a rattling row of nautical terms suitable only for the Marine Dictionary. Phæbus and Clio must lend a hand to brail up the mizen, or belay the topping-lift.

The persons-Albert prudent and bold, the rough Rodmond, the tender Arion--are drawn in simple outlines. 'Some part of the love-story of Palemon,' says Campbell, 'is rather swainish.' But Falconer's love-sentiment is as genuine as any other part of the feeling of his poem ; and a sailor writing on gentle themes becomes perhaps naturally a swain. The seal of fidelity was set upon Falconer's sea-poem by death--an unknown death in some unknown sea.

EDWARD DOWDEN