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decay reigns throughout them all; and, though many of them appear busy and crowded - having actually a considerable commerce there is this appearance of the former glory and splendor of better days, and of present decay and abandonment, in them all the splendid palaces, that grace the principal streets, seems to be tenantless and falling to ruin; everything speaks a silent, but melancholy language that the prosperity and happiness of these beautiful cities has passed away; and that a foreign tyrant controls their destinies, with an iron grasp. The same appearance of decay is discernible in the country villas, which are very numerous, especially between Padua and Venice.

ASSOCIATION.

We all have our peculiarities. This is an admirable truism, wherewith to begin a maiden article, in the healthiest of magazines, and most delightful of monthly apparitions, for the reason that it (the Magazine, kind reader) has a peculiarity, which is, that its life is not as other lives; it flourishes in perpetual spring. I know not how it may be with the rest of the world; in fact, I do not care very much; but I have very distinct and palpable associations with certain authors. Association is so remarkable, that I cannot divest myself from strong prejudice against excellent writers, merely from the cut of their coats. One of the Elizabethean age, puzzles me extremely with his tight breeches and magnificent yellow bows, his timepiece formality and injudicious powder, until I resolve, in an antiquarian spirit, it would be an agreeable thing to know nothing of antique, unnecessary fashion. Even the old blind schoolmaster comes in, sedate and grave; and, seating himself studiously at my side, introduces his conversation, in complimental phrase, judiciously interlarding it with puritanical quotation. His long, auburn hair flows over his shoulders; his dark eyes look full upon me; his hands are whiter than the hands of this delving generation. I vainly endeavor to get rid of him; but he remains, staring at me with his sightless pupils, till finally I lay down the book, in despair, and go out, among carts and dirty cart-drivers, to dispel the apparition of John Milton. It is a sorrowful thing, for one like myself to do; but the shade of the severe schoolmaster is more troublesome than my own thin shadow.

Not only does the author of Paradise Lost' visit my poor

garret, in spiritual guise, and garb reverend and sombre, but other poets of the olden time. I esteem it a peculiar blessing, that I have no distinct notion of Shakspeare; so I read him anywhere and everywhere, with fearlessness and a steadfast spirit. Not so is it with his merry cotemporary, Ben Jonson. Honest Ben is with me, Abel Drugger, and a thousand other men. Even his learned characters become corpulent, since I have somewhere picked up an idea, that Ben himself was fat, and he always carried in his hand a black, dirty snuff-box, tendering it officiously

to me.

Once in a while, to freshen my memory, and keep alive his solemn pauses, I look into Pope. Now flits the ghost of the wee poet around me, bent and insolent, with a wig superfluously powdered, and a redundancy of wristband. He takes snuff, with all the vigor and capacity of humorous Ben; and his nose twinkles like a star; verily, the image of Pope is as disagreeable and melancholy, as if, in very person, came in a former satirical friend. I would that I could read ye venerable poets without reading your prim and starched outer man. My associations with authors, are often of a pleasing nature, and particularly those of this day. I love to converse with Coleridge, of a mild afternoon, in the cool forest-he is so beautiful and eloquent; still, he pains me when I am rising heavenward, with his metaphysical speculation, by remarking that I did not quite understand this, or that; and down I come, Vulcan like, from my seventh Heaven, not a little enraged. He should be more considerate in his chiding. Yet, I find it impossible to anger long, so he still lies open upon my table. I have journeyed with Wordsworth a thousand times, by lake and swift-running stream. Never was there so delightful a companion-never one so simple; his Excursion is my Excursion his wandering, mine. These are the real friends, who never fail, and never murmur - these well-thumbed books, needing no food, nor fire, nor new garment; with these, I wander along in the hard journey of life; with these, I solace the passing hours. It is all made real by association.

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Who loves not Charles Lamb, with his strange wit, and unequivocal good-nature? Who does not feel, as he glides over the pleasant passage and quaint avenues where the hedge is still cut in antiquated style, of Elia-that he is journeying with a most excellent fellow-passenger? His heart is fairly before the reader, with all its tenderness; his overflowing heart is in his pages, unbounded. I must confess, I have few friends, of flesh and blood, that I love as this same Charles Lamb.

Magical association makes my garret other than a vulgar, rented attic; it converts it into an abode of the spirits. The clumsily connected walls are not covered with paint nor mortar, but with those wonderful pieces of paper, stitched together by manufac

tured needle, containing human thoughts; they are, indeed, the production of the distinct man. There are very many of them, both old and new. Thoughts of yesterday, of day before yesterday, of day before that. See how curiously the mind contrasts. I place the thoughts of yesterday by the thoughts of day before yesterday, and it seems like a proof against time. I wish I could introduce you, considerate reader, to my silent comparisons'they are so amicable. It is true, here you may see one set of opinions valorously defended, while, in the next neighbor, they are systematically, perchance stubbornly, opposed; yet, the two stand there, side by side, not even turning up the extreme point of their noses at one another. It would be troublesome, if men were so placable. I often muse, in my leather-bottomed chair, among these thoughts. It would not suit a mechanic, nor a lawyer; for nothing is to be gained by it, neither gold-dust, nor cause; yet it suits me. I hear the voice of the past, sounding up from these dust-covered books, like the sound of the distant ocean, at midnight; it is a sad harmony - telling of human frailty, and human sin, and human variety; hence is it a warning voice, and may it ever be a warning. The tongue, that uttered those woundrous words, is stilled; the mind, that is here recorded, has gone from this world; and I- what am I, but dust! I shall soon depart, myself.

This low garret of mine, is a type of the world-made so by association, which connects things humble with things lofty, the boot-cleaner with the king.

POETRY OF THE PRAIRIES.*

THIS little volume is another of the 'Curiosities of Literature.' It is anomalous ; nothing like it has been produced in our country, or in any other, we venture to add. The style, especially, is its own. It reminds one of Shelley, indeed; and, here and there, of Keats. It is melancholy and metaphysical; yet, it is decidedly the manner of a person who thinks for himself, and is able to do so; and of one, also, who reads but little of the thoughts of anybody else. He says, in his preface, that it is some time since he has seen the works of any poet. Things remembered, therefore, may have become fused in the crucible of an ardent mind like

*Prose Sketches and Poems, written in the Western Country, by Albert Pike. Boston: Light & Horton.

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his, always glowing, with things imagined and things dreamed of; but there is no wilful plagiarism in his poems, he says and we believe him. They are a transcript of his own feelings. If anybody else ever felt as he does which is not impossible-why, that is no business of his, nor theirs, nor of the public's. sides, for a man's metal to be run into my mixture, through accident, by being left upon my premises, and mingled with my ore, is one thing; and for me to invade his, and ransack his lumber-room, deliberately, like a thief in the daylight, and carry off his lines, bodily, as if they were pig-lead that is another thing, altogether. Pike has not done this. His materials and his tools are his own. His furnace and his fuel are his own, too; and the only difficulty with the former is, that it is so hot as to work up every other material, worth working up, which happens to be left within the reach of its fervor. He says'I am, at times, when an idea flashes upon me, uncertain whether it be my own, or whether it has clung to my mind from the works of the poets, till it has seemed to become my own peculiar property.' This is all we intended to say; and it is honestly stated. It were well, if half as much honesty prevailed among the brotherhood of regular borrowers. From the stealers, it is not expected, of course; neither is it from the paupers. The former run the risk, at least, of being set in the stocks of common contempt, for their petit larceny; and the latter are maintained with a comparative cheerfulness-setting aside one's compassion for their destitute and pitiful circumstances which arises, partly from the plain necessity of the case, and partly from the general distribution of the tax which gives them a living.

We incline to the opinion rather, that our poet, so far as he has calculated the effects of his composition at all, has aimed too proudly at a reputation for the reverse of this a reputation for singularity and originality both; and for a perfect independence, besides, in the display of them. Some of his pieces look as if he had reviewed them with this feeling, and stricken out everything which resembled or reminded of what was ever written before leaving the residuum of his own daring and defying bitterness the pikery, if you please, -(we beg his pardon for tumbling over a poor pun)-alone in its glory. There is, at all events, a great proportion of originality in his poems; a tincture of thought; a raciness, ill-disguised, and hardly attempted to be disguised at all, with the slow distillment of sappy proprieties, or the sugar of sweet quotations. Hence, an air of the fantastical, sometimes. He disclaims affectation, but we think not with. such justice as he disclaims plagiarism. In one sense only he is right. His writing is, as he alleges, a communing with his own soul.' There is no insincerity in his style; no lack of true feeling his own feeling; but, whether that feeling itself be

natural altogether, or the result, in some measure, of what we call affectation, may be a matter of debate. Some people, and especially some poets, may be said to be naturally affected. They are constitutionally disposed to be influenced as other people are not; and to retain, indulge, and display these influences. Habits are thus superinduced, which become a second-nature, in time; and such, in no small degree, has been Mr. Pike's case. His sensibility, and his susceptibility, of every sort, were of the keenest kind. His discipline, his powers of self-denial and selfdefence, were less so. He was assailed by circumstances, and they drove him from his balance. He yielded to what he considered his destiny, and took refuge though we trust not permanently — in the solitude of his own feelings. To these, he has given the only vent he could have. Society was no more for him, but its memory haunted him. He laid himself, like the Hebrew exiles, on the banks of the stranger's stream, and poured forth the anguish of a lonely sorrow in his lays. After all, it is not exactly affectation. It is the sincerity of a mind in a forced condition. It is true feeling upon false premises; fancy, wrought into frenzy; a morbid mind, walking in its sleep, and always seeing, as it walks and talks, the dagger of the dream.

We need not remark, that all this is with us matter, not of information, but of inference. The poetry is, for the most part, of the morbid school - though not unfrequently redeemed, even in this department, by an outbreaking of natural strong sense, as well as almost invariably set off respectably by a flourish of what may be called the fire-works of imagination, and the melody of ingenious verse. He says to the robin, for example, in the val

ley of Tisuqui,

-

"Go back

On thy track;

It were wiser and better for thee and me,

Than to moan
Alone,

So far from the waves of our own bright sea:

And the eyes that we left,

To grow dim months ago,

Will greet us again

With their idolized glow.

Let us go-let us go

and revisit our home,

Where the oak-leaves are green and the sea-waters foam.'

One would hardly expect, on turning over the next leaf, (we wish our author would turn over a new one, as readily as we do) to find the fellow thus 'down at the heel' again :

'Well, I have chosen my long path,

And I will walk it to the death,

Though Love's lone grief, or hatred's wrath,

My way and purpose hindereth.

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