But never more could see the man,

Approaching from the town!"

These are lines which none but a poet by nature could make, and they are such lines as make poets. From the same juvenile composition we learn that Kirke White was early acquainted with Spenser and Milton. Describing his evening walks with a favourite school-fellow, he says,

"To gaze upon the clouds, whose colour'd pride
Was scatter'd thinly o'er the welkin wide,
And tinged with such variety of shade,

To the charm'd soul sublimest thoughts convey❜d.
In these, what forms romantic did we trace,
While fancy led us o'er the realms of space!
Now we espied the thunderer in his car,
Leading the embattled seraphim to war ;

Then stately towers descried, sublimely high,
In Gothic grandeur frowning on the sky;
Or saw, wide-stretching o'er the azure height,
A ridge of glaciers, in mural white,
Hugely terrific!"

Any eye might build castles in the clouds, or discover towers and glaciers amidst the pomp of sunset; but the imagination of the poet alone, fired with the first perusal of Milton, would discern in them the battle array of the seraphim, and the war in heaven, when

"Forth rush'd, with whirlwind sound, The chariot of paternal Deity,

Flashing thick flames ;"

and especially that wonderful couplet, in which the

approach of Messiah is described:

"Attended with ten thousand, thousand saints, He onward came:—far off his coming shone!" I have laid emphasis on the latter clause, in which, with five of the plainest words that our language contains, "the poet blind yet bold" has struck out, condensed, and displayed, with unsurpassable effect, one of the most magnificent images to be found even in Paradise Lost:

"Far off his coming shone!"

The memory of Henry Kirke White has been embalmed rather by the genius of his biographer (Dr. Southey) than his own. He was, unquestionably, a youth of extraordinary promise; but it must be acknowledged, that he has left little which would have secured him more than a transient reputation, if his posthumous papers had fallen into other hands than those of the best-natured of critics and the most magnanimous of poets. There is no great infusion, in his most finished pieces, of fine fancy, romantic feeling, or fervid eloquence. Their distinguishing characteristics are good sense and pious sentiment, strongly enforced, and sometimes admirably expressed; indeed the cast of his thought was rather didactic, than either imaginative or impassioned. Nevertheless, some of his fragments of verse, penned occasionally on the backs of mathematical exercises at college, in fits of inspiration, show that the spirit was far from being quenched within him, after he had formally abandoned poesy as a pursuit ; but that, in sickness, solitude, and studies the most

difficult and uncongenial, the hidden fire burned more intensely for repression, and now and then flashed out portentously. The following lines, though the second is lame, and the cold critic might perhaps find fifty faults in them, are strikingly sublime. There is a veil of obscurity upon them, like that which hides the secrets of the eternal world: :

"Once more, and yet once more,

I give unto my harp a dark-woven lay :
I heard the waters roar,

I heard the flood of ages pass away."

"O thou stern spirit, that dost dwell
In thine eternal cell,

Noting, grey chronicler! the silent years,

I saw thee rise, I saw thy scroll complete ;

Thou spakest, and at thy feet
The universe gave way!"

*

*

It was well that the author left this sketch unfinished; another line might have let it down from "the highest heaven of invention," in which it had been conceived, and into which the mind of the reader is rapt in the endeavour to decipher the hieroglyphic hint. Henry died at the age of twenty-one years. In some rough blank verses, composed long before his decease, he thus anticipated an early grave:

"Ay, I have planned full many a sanguine scheme Of earthly happiness;

* * *

And it is hard

To feel the hand of Death arrest one's steps,
Throw a chill blight on all one's budding hopes,
And hurl one's soul untimely to the shades,
Lost in the gaping gulf of blank oblivion.

-Fifty years hence, and who will think of Henry?
Oh, none ! another busy brood of beings
Will shoot up in the interim, and none
Will hold him in remembrance.

" I shall sink,

As sinks a stranger in the crowded streets
Of busy London ;- some short bustle's caused,
A few enquiries, and the crowd close in,
And all's forgotten."

This may be very meagre poetry, but the sentiments, in connection with the author's subsequent history, are exceedingly affecting. The very remarkable simile at the conclusion, familiar as it seems, I believe to be perfectly original; and the moral may be extended beyond its personal application here. What is the date of fame itself, and the circumstances accompanying it, more than the death of a stranger in the public streets of a great city, occasioning a momentary interruption in a perpetual crowd? a few enquiries and exclamations, then all goes on again as it hath done for centuries past, on that very spot, and may go to the world's end!

The crown of Kirke White's labours in verse was a solitary book of "The Christiad," a sacred poem on the sufferings and death of our Saviour. In reference to this, his kind-hearted biographer observes,

"I cannot refrain from saying, that the two last stanzas (of this fragment) greatly affected me, when I discovered them written on the leaf of a different book, and apparently long after the first canto; and greatly shall I be mistaken if they do not affect the reader also. They are these:

Thus far have I pursued my solemn theme,
With self-rewarding toil;- thus far have sung
Of godlike deeds, far loftier than beseem

The lyre which I, in earlier days, have strung:

And now my spirits faint; and I have hung
The shell that solaced me in saddest hour

On the dark cypress! and the strains which rung
With Jesus' praise, their harpings now are o'er,
Or, when the breeze comes by, moan, and are heard

no more.

*

And must the harp of Judah sleep again?
Shall I no more re-animate the lay?
Oh! Thou, who visitest the sons of men!
Thou, who dost listen when the humble pray!

'One little space prolong my mortal day;

One little lapse suspend thy last decree;

I am a youthful traveller in the way;

And this slight boon would consecrate to Thee, Ere I with death shake hands, and smile that I am free."

These were probably the last stanzas the dying poet ever penned, for it pleased God to grant him a higher boon than that for which he prayed: - he asked for life, and he received immortality.

Robert Burns,

"The Ayrshire Ploughman," as he was first called

or Burns, as he shall for ages be known by a monosyllable, that will need neither prefix nor adjunct to designate to whom "of that ilk" it belongs,Burns was so truly a born-poet (if ever there were one), that whatever tended to develope his powers must be