A gentle hill its side inclines,

Lovely in England's fadeless green,
To meet the quiet stream which winds
Through this romantic scene
As silently and sweetly still

As when, at evening, on that hill,

While summer's wind blew soft and low, Seated by gallant Hotspur's side, His Katherine was a happy bride, A thousand years ago.

I wandered through the lofty halls
Trod by the Percys of old fame,
And traced upon the chapel walls

Each high, heroic name,

From him who once his standard set Where now, o'er mosque and minaret,

Glitter the Sultan's crescent moons, To him who, when a younger son, Fought for King George at Lexington, A major of dragoons.

That last half-stanza, - it has dashed
From my warm lip the sparkling cup;
The light that o'er my eyebeam flashed,
The power that bore my spirit up
Above this bank-note world, is gone;
And Alnwick 's but a market town,
And this, alas! its market day,

And beasts and borderers throng the way;
Oxen and bleating lambs in lots,
Northumbrian boors and plaided Scots,
Men in the coal and cattle line;
From Teviot's bard and hero land,
From royal Berwick's beach of sand,
From Wooller, Morpeth, Hexham, and
Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

These are not the romantic times
So beautiful in Spenser's rhymes,

So dazzling to the dreaming boy;
Ours are the days of fact, not fable,
Of knights, but not of the round table,
Of Bailie Jarvie, not Rob Roy ;
'T is what "Our President," Monroe,
Has called "the era of good feeling";
The Highlander, the bitterest foe
To modern laws, has felt their blow,
Consented to be taxed, and vote,
And put on pantaloons and coat,

And leave off cattle-stealing:
Lord Stafford mines for coal and salt,
The Duke of Norfolk deals in malt,

The Douglass in red herrings;
And noble name and cultured land,
Palace, and park, and vassal band,
Are powerless to the notes of hand
Of Rothschild or the Barings.

The age of bargaining, said Burke,
Has come to-day the turbaned Turk,
(Sleep, Richard of the lion heart!
Sleep on, nor from your cerements start)
Is England's friend and fast ally;
The Moslem tramples on the Greek,
And on the Cross and altar-stone,
And Christendom looks tamely on,
And hears the Christian maiden shriek,
And sees the Christian father die ;
And not a sabre-blow is given

For Greece and fame, for faith and heaven, By Europe's craven chivalry.

You'll ask if yet the Percy lives

In the armed pomp of feudal state?
The present representatives

Of Hotspur and his "gentle Kate,"
Are some half-dozen serving-men
In the drab coat of William Penn;

A chambermaid, whose lip and eye,

And cheek, and brown hair, bright and curling, Spoke nature's aristocracy.;

And one, half groom, half seneschal,

Who bowed me through court, bower, and hall,
From donjon keep to turret wall,
For ten-and-sixpence sterling.

FITZ-GREENE HALLECK.

THE FISHER'S COTTAGE.

WE sat by the fisher's cottage,
And looked at the stormy tide;
The evening mist came rising,
And floating far and wide.

One by one in the lighthouse

The lamps shone out on high;
And far on the dim horizon
A ship went sailing by.

We spoke of storm and shipwreck,
Of sailors, and how they live;

Of journeys 'twixt sky and water,
And the sorrows and joys they give.

We spoke of distant countries,

In regions strange and fair,

And of the wondrous beings

And curious customs there;

Of perfumed lamps on the Ganges,

Which are launched in the twilight hour; And the dark and silent Brahmins,

Who worship the lotos flower.

Of the wretched dwarfs of Lapland,

-

Broad-headed, wide-mouthed, and small,— Who crouch round their oil-fires, cooking, And chatter and scream and bawl.

While sea-born gales their gelid wings expand To winnow fragrance round the smiling land.

But small the bliss that sense alone bestows,
And sensual bliss is all the nation knows.
In florid beauty groves and fields appear,
Man seems the only growth that dwindles here.
Contrasted faults through all his manners reign;
Though poor, luxurious; though submissive, vain;
Though grave, yet trifling; zealous, yet untrue;
And e'en in penance planning sins anew.
All evils here contaminate the mind,
That opulence departed leaves behind;
For wealth was theirs; not far removed the date
When commerce proudly flourished through the
state;

At her command the palace learnt to rise,
Again the long-fallen column sought the skies;
The canvas glowed beyond e'en Nature warm,
The pregnant quarry teemed with human form.
Till, more unsteady than the southern gale,
Commerce on other shores displayed her sail;
While naught remained of all that riches gave,
But towns unmanned, and lords without a slave:
And late the nation found with fruitless skill
Its former strength was but plethoric ill.

Yet still the loss of wealth is here supplied By arts, the splendid wrecks of former pride; From these the feeble heart and long-fallen mind An easy compensation seem to find.

Here may be seen, in bloodless pomp arrayed,
The pasteboard triumph and the cavalcade;
Processions formed for piety and love,
A mistress or a saint in every grove.

By sports like these are all their cares beguiled,

The sports of children satisfy the child;
Each nobler aim, represt by long control,
Now sinks at last, or feebly mans the soul;
While low delights succeeding fast behind,
In happier meanness occupy the mind;
As in those domes where Cæsars once bore sway,
Defaced by time and tottering in decay,
There in the ruin, heedless of the dead,
The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed,
And, wondering man could want the larger pile,
Exults, and owns his cottage with a smile.

My soul, turn from them, turn we to survey, Where rougher climes a nobler race display, Where the bleak Swiss their stormy mansion

tread,

And force a churlish soil for scanty bread;
No product here the barren hills afford,
But man and steel, the soldier and his sword.
No vernal blooms their torpid rocks array,
But winter lingering chills the lap of May;
No zephyr fondly sues the mountain's breast,
But meteors glare, and stormy glooms invest.
Yet still, e'en here, content can spread a charm,
Redress the clime, and all its rage disarm,

Though poor the peasant's hut, his feasts though small,

He sees his little lot the lot of all;
Sees no contiguous palace rear its head
To shame the meanness of his humble shed,
No costly lord the sumptuous banquet deal
To make him loathe his vegetable meal;
But calm, and bred in ignorance and toil,
Each wish contracting, fits him to the soil.
Cheerful at morn, he wakes from short repose,
Breathes the keen air, and carols as he goes;
With patient angle trolls the finny deep,
Or drives his venturous ploughshare to the steep;
Or seeks the den where snow-tracks mark the way,
And drags the struggling savage into day.
At night returning, every labor sped,
He sits him down the monarch of a shed:
Smiles by his cheerful fire, and round surveys
His children's looks, that brighten at the blaze;
While his loved partner, boastful of her hoard,
Displays her cleanly platter on the board;
And haply too some pilgrim, thither led,
With many a tale repays the nightly bed.

ITALY.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

O ITALY, how beautiful thou art! Yet I could weep, for thou art lying, alas! Low in the dust; and they who come admire thee As we admire the beautiful in death. Thine was a dangerous gift, the gift of beauty. Would thou hadst less, or wert as once thou wast, Inspiring awe in those who now enslave thee! But why despair? Twice hast thou lived already, Twice shone among the nations of the world, As the sun shines among the lesser lights Of heaven; and shalt again. The hour shall come, When they who think to bind the ethereal spirit, Who, like the eagle cowering o'er his prey, Watch with quick eye, and strike and strike again If but a sinew vibrate, shall confess Their wisdom folly.

VENICE.

SAMUEL ROGERS.

THERE is a glorious City in the Sea. The Sea is in the broad, the narrow streets, Ebbing and flowing; and the salt sea-weed Clings to the marble of her palaces. No track of men, no footsteps to and fro, Lead to her gates. The path lies o'er the Sea, Invisible; and from the land we went, As to a floating City, - steering in, And gliding up her streets as in a dream,

So smoothly, silently, by many a dome
Mosque-like, and many a stately portico,
The statues ranged along an azure sky;

By many a pile in more than Eastern splendor,
Of old the residence of merchant kings;

The fronts of some, though Time had shattered them,

Still glowing with the richest hues of art,

ROME.

And whence the talisman by which she rose Towering? 'T was found there in the barren sea. Want led to Enterprise; and, far or near, Who met not the Venetian? - now in Cairo ; Ere yet the Califa came, listening to hear Its bells approaching from the Red Sea coast; Now on the Euxine, on the Sea of Azoph, In converse with the Persian, with the Russ, The Tartar; on his lowly deck receiving Pearls from the gulf of Ormus, gems from Bagdad, Eyes brighter yet, that shed the light of love From Georgia, from Circassia. Wandering round, When in the rich bazaar he saw, displayed, Treasures from unknown climes, away he went, And, travelling slowly upward, drew erelong From the well-head supplying all below; Making the Imperial City of the East Herself his tributary.

Thus did Venice rise,

Thus flourish, till the unwelcome tidings came,
That in the Tagus had arrived a fleet
From India, from the region of the Sun,
Fragrant with spices, that a way was found,
A channel opened, and the golden stream
Turned to enrich another. Then she felt
Her strength departing, and at last she fell,
Fell in an instant, blotted out and razed;
She who had stood yet longer than the longest
Of the Four Kingdoms, who, as in an Ark,
Had floated down amid a thousand wrecks,
Uninjured, from the Old World to the New.

SAMUEL ROGERS.

And I spring up as girt to run a race!

Thou art in Rome! the City that so long Reigned absolute, the mistress of the world; The mighty vision that the prophets saw, And trembled; that from nothing, from the least, The lowliest village (what but here and there A reed-roofed cabin by a river-side? ) Grew into everything; and, year by year, Patiently, fearlessly working her way O'er brook and field, o'er continent and sea, Not like the merchant with his merchandise, Or traveller with staff and scrip exploring, But hand to hand and foot to foot through hosts, Through nations numberless in battle array, Each behind each, each, when the other fell, Up and in arms, at length subdued them all.

SAMUEL ROGERS.

THE GRECIAN TEMPLES AT PESTUM.

IN Pæstum's ancient fanes I trod,
And mused on those strange men of old,
Whose dark religion could infold
So many gods, and yet no God!

Did they to human feelings own,
And had they human souls indeed,
Or did the sternness of their creed
Frown their faint spirits into stone?

The southern breezes fan my face; –
I hear the hum of bees arise,
And lizards dart, with mystic eyes,
That shrine the secret of the place!

These silent columns speak of dread,
Of lovely worship without love;
And yet the warm, deep heaven above
Whispers a softer tale instead!

ROSSITER W. RAYMOND.

COLISEUM BY MOONLIGHT.

FROM " MANFRED."

THE stars are forth, the moon above the tops Of the snow-shining mountains. Beautiful!