should be unwilling to purchase anonymous poems, when such reams of trash, dignified with the name of poetry, are yearly issued from the press. Rhododaphne, however, is by no means of the common stamp: indeed it is remarkable for having not a single battle, castle, Indian, nor knight in the whole book-yet notwithstanding this singular deficiency it is interesting and beautiful. By what magic, a reader will be disposed to inquire, is such a prodigy produced as a fine poem without a battle or a mystery? The wonder is effected simply by a recourse to the too much neglected fountains of Grecian mythology.

Now we are aware that the mere mention of ancient Greece is sufficient to scare away half the would-be-readers of any work of fiction. We have grown dreadfully afraid of any thing that reminds us of our schoolboy studies, and prepare to doze over a story twenty times told of Thebes and Pelops' line, or the tale of Troy divine.' But in this instance an agreeable disappointment awaits the reader, who, not discouraged nor dismayed, ventures to open the volume. The author (or authoress rather, for we are told it is the production of a lady,) has taken advantage of the prevailing taste for the dwarf epopee or novellette in rhyme, and without being less purely classic has constructed neither an epic nor a pastoral, but a very spirited and entertaining story, enlivened with all the charms of beautiful imagery and animated description. The ground work of this tale, as set forth in the preface, is this: 'The belief in the supernatural powers of music and pharmacy ascends to the earliest ages of poetry. Its most beautiful forms are the Circe of Homer, and Medea, in the days of her youth, as she appears in the third book of Apollonius.

'Lucian's treatise on the Syrian goddess contains much wild and wonderful imagery; and his Philopseudes, though it does not mention Thessalian magic in particular, is a compendium of almost all the ideas entertained by the ancients of supernatural power, distinct from, and subordinate to, that of the gods; though the gods were supposed to be drawn from their cars by magic, and compelled, however reluctantly, to yield it a temporary obedience. These subjects appear to have been favourite topics with the ancients in their social hours, as we may judge from the Philopseudes, and from the tales related by Niceros and Trimalchio at the feast given by the latter in the Satyricon of Petronius. Trimalchio concludes his marvellous narrative by saying (in the words which form the motto of this poem:)" You must of necessity believe that there are women of supernatural science, framers of nocturnal incantations, who can turn the world upside down."

'It will appear from these references, and more might have been made if it had not appeared superfluous, that the power ascribed by the ancients to Thessalian magic is by no means exaggerated in the following poem, though its forms are in some measure diversified.

'The opening scene of the poem, is in the Temple of Love at Thespia, a town of Beotia, near the foot of mount Helicon. That love was the principal deity of Thespia we learn from Pausanias; and Plutarch, in the beginning of his Erotic dialogue, informs us, that a festival in honour of this deity was celebrated by the Thespians with great splendor every fifth year. They also celebrated a quinquennial festival in honour of the Muses, who had a sacred grove and temple in Helicon.'

Anthemion, the hero of the tale, an Arcadian youth, attends the festival at the temple of Love at Thespia. He has brought an offering of wild-flowers, and sacrifices them to the god with a prayer that the divinity will restore his beloved and betrothed maiden Calliroe to health-the efforts of Esculapius having failed to cure her of a disease which threatened her life.

'Beside the altar's foot he stands,
And murmurs low his suppliant vow,
And now uplifts with duteous hands
The votive wild-flower wreath, and now—
At once as when in vernal night

Comes pale frost or eastern blight,
Sweeping with destructive wing

Banks untimely blossoming,

Droops the wreath, the wild-flowers die;
One by one on earth they lie,
Blighted strangely, suddenly.

His brain swims round; portentous fear

Across his wildered fancy flies:

Shall death thus sieze his maiden dear?

Does love reject his sacrifice?

He caught the arm of a damsel near,' &c.

This damsel is the enchantress Rhododaphne, who, in semblance of a maid of surpassing loveliness, whose

Bright hair, in the noon-beams glowing,

A rose-bud wreath above confined,
From whence, as from a fountain flowing,
Long ringlets round her temples twined,
And fell in many a graceful fold,
Streaming in curls of feathery lightness
Around her neck's marmoreal whiteness.
Love, in the smile that round her lips,
Twin roses of persuasion, played,
-Nectaries of balmier sweets than sips
The Hymettian bee,—his ambush laid;
And his own shafts of liquid fire
Came on the soul with sweet surprise,
Through the soft dews of young desire
That trembled in her large dark eyes,
But in those eyes there seemed to move
A flame, almost too bright for love,
That shone, with intermitting flashes,
Beneath their long deep-shadowy lashes."

She offers him consolation, in language most heterodox at the court of Love, incitements to inconstancy and sin, and an offer of half her own wreath.

-Flowers may die on many a stem;
Fruits may fall from many a tree;
Not the more for loss of them
Shall this fair world a desert be:
Thou in every grove wilt see
Fruits and flowers enough for thee.
Stranger! I with thee will share
The votive fruits and flowers I bear,
Rich in fragrance, fresh in bloom;
These may find a happier doom:
If they change not, fade not now,
Deem that love accepts thy vow.’-

Anthemion, mistrustless of the maid, accepts her flowers and offers them with her sacrifice-the dissevered flowers entwine and blend again upon the altar-she declares his sacrifice is accepted, and again with eloquent sophistry inculcates the folly and impossibility of constancy. He remains faithful, however, to his Calli roe, and after his accepting a flower from Rhododaphne they part. Anthemion wandering listless and sad among the dancing choirs, is met by an aged man that explains to him the true character of his new acquaintance.—

— What evil,'—thus the stranger spoke,—

Has this our city done to thee,

Ill-omened boy, that thou should'st be

A blot on our solemnity?

Or what Alastor bade thee wear

That laurel-rose, to love profane,

Whose leaves, in semblance falsely fair

Of love's maternal flower, contain

For purest fragrance deadliest bane?*

The youth explains how innocently he received the flower, and the old man describes its baleful qualities.

- Oh youth, beware! that laurel-rose
Around Larissa's evil walls

In tufts of rank luxuriance grows,
'Mid dreary valleys, by the falls
Of haunted streams: and magic knows
No herb or plant of deadlier might,
When impious footsteps wake by night
The echoes of those dismal dells,
What time the murky midnight dew
Trembles on many a leaf and blossom,

That draws from earth's polluted bosom

Mysterious virtue, to imbue

The chalice of unnatural spells.

* These roses were not true roses: they were flowers of the wild laurel, which men call rhododaphne, or rose laurel. It is a bad dinner for either horse or ass, the eating of it being attended by immediate death. Lucianus.

61

He also instructs Anthemion how to get rid of the spell connected with it, for which purpose he is to seek the river side, and with averted face

Give to the stream that flower, nor look

Upon the running wave again, &c.

Anthemion does as he had been advised, but is tempted by the sound of a voice, resembling his Calliroe, as if in the last extremity of drowning-he turns his head

'The sun upon the surface bright
Poured his last line of crimsom light,
Half-sunk behind the hill:

But through the solemn plane-trees past
The pinions of a mightier blast,
And in its many-sounding sweep,
Among the foliage broad and deep,
Aerial voices seemed to sigh,
As if the spirits of the grove
Mourned, in prophetic sympathy
With some disastrous love.

We pass rapidly over the pages, because the story does not bear abridging, and this notice of the poem is intended to invite to a perusal of it, not to supply its place. Anthemion again encounters the enchantress, and again resists her wiles, but does not escape without a kiss fraught with poison to all lips that might thereafter press his own. With this spell, he seeks unwittingly his home and his beloved Calliroe-a spell laid on him by a power which the authoress intimates, retains its witchery even in this laggard age of plain fact and dull realities.

Magic and mystery, spells Circæan,
The Siren voice, that calmed the sea,
And steeped the soul in dews Lethæan:
The enchanted chalice, sparkling free
With wine, amid whose ruby glow
Love couched, with madness linked, and wo;
Mantle and zone, whose woof beneath
Lurked wily grace, in subtle wreath
With blandishment and young desire
And soft persuasion, intertwined,
Whose touch, with sympathetic fire,
Could melt at once the sternest mind;
Have passed away: for vestal truth
Young fancy's foe, and reason chill,

Have chased the dreams that charmed the youth
Of nature and the world, which still,

Amid that vestal light severe,

Our colder spirits leap to hear
Like echoes from a fairy hill.

Yet deem not so. The power of spells
Still lingers on the earth, but dwells
In deeper folds of close disguise,
That baffle reason's searching eyes;

Nor shall that mystic power resign
To truth's cold sway his webs of guile,
Till woman's eyes have ceased to shine,
And woman's lips have ceased to smile,
And woman's voice has ceased to be
The earthly soul of melody.

He finds her, whom he had almost despaired again to see alive, perfectly restored to health.

'Oh, joy!

The maid he left so fast consuming,
Whom death, impatient to destroy,
Had marked his prey, now rosy-blooming,
And beaming like the morning star
With loveliness and love, has flown
To welcome him: his cares fly far,
Like clouds when storms are overblown;
For where such perfect transports reign
Even memory has no place for pain.

The poet's task were passing sweet,
If, when he tells how lovers meet,
One half the flow of joy, that flings
Its magic on that blissful hour,
Could touch, with sympathetic power,
His lyre's accordant strings.

It may not be. The lyre is mute,
When venturous minstrelsy would suit
Its numbers to so dear a theme:

But many a gentle maid, I deem,

Whose heart has known and felt the like,

Can hear, in fancy's kinder dream,

The chords I dare not strike.'

The reader can but anticipate that he forgets Rhododaphne's

fatal kiss.

Oh! he has kissed Calliroe's lips!

And with the touch the made grew pale,
And sudden shade of strange eclipse
Drew o'er her eyes its dusky veil.
As droops the meadow-pink its head,
By the rude sithe in summer's prime
Cleft from its parent stem, and spread
On earth to wither ere its time:
Even so the flower of Ladon faded,
Swifter than when the sun hath shaded
In the young storm his setting ray,
The western radiance dies away.
Though pity's self has made thy breast
Its earthly shrine, Oh gentle maid!
Shed not thy tears, where love's last rest
Is sweet beneath the cypress shade;
Whence never voice of tyrant power,
Nor trumpet-blast from rending skies,
Nor winds that howl, nor storms that lower,
Shall bid the sleeping sufferer rise.
But mourn for them, who live to keep
Sad strife with fortune's tempests rude;
For them, who live to toil and weep
In loveless, joyless solitude;' &c.