Strong love prevail'd: she busks, she bounes,
She mounts the barb behind,

And round her darling William's waist
Her lily arms she twined.

And now she begins the most appalling ride ever imagined, on the spectre horse, close clasping the dead rider. They go like lightning-they dash through a funeral train-and breathless and terrified the Bride perceives the unburied corpse, and the mourners all join in fearful pursuit of the wild steed she rides. They come to a desert plain in which a murderer's body is hung in irons.

"Dost fear? dost fear? The moon shines clear,
Dost fear to ride with me?

Hurrah! hurrah! the dead can ride!"

O William, let them be!

"See there! see there! what yonder swings
And creaks 'mid whistling rain ?"
Gibbet and steel, th' accursed wheel;
A murd'rer in his chain.

"Hollo! thou felon, follow here:
To bridal bed we ride;

And thou shalt prance a fetter dance
Before me and my bride."

And hurry! hurry! clash! clash! clash!

The wasted form descends:

And fleet as wind through hazel bush

The wild career attends.

Tramp! tramp! along the land they rode,
Splash! splash! along the sea;

The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,
The flashing pebbles flee.

They pursue their mad career till they enter a churchyard, and come to an open grave. There the rider stops.

The falling gauntlet quits the rein,
Down drops the casque of steel;
The cuirass leaves his shrinking side,
The spur his gory heel;

The eyes desert the naked skull,

The mould'ring flesh the bone,

Till Helen's lily arms entwine
A ghastly skeleton.

The furious barb snorts fire and foam,
And, with a fearful bound,
Dissolves at once in empty air,

And leaves her on the ground.

Some little consolation is introduced in the last stanza, where we are told the moral of the story

E'en when the heart's with anguish cleft,

Revere the doom of Heav'n.

Her soul is from her body reft,

Her spirit be forgiven!

But translation, at the best, is a mere exercise of ingenuity, and bears the same relation to

original composition that a dance in fetters bears to a gallop on the hill-side. Your attention is more taken up with the necessity of keeping your chain from hurting your motion, than with the necessity of getting over the ground. And it is pleasant to see how soon this great original genius gave up the fetters and took to the free air. Yet, not altogether released from the chain he had worn was the first work which he published as entirely his own. The spell of the old ballads was upon him, which made his action for awhile constrained, but the links it hung upon him were of exquisite metal, and were "musical exceedingly." The first work that revealed that the English language could count on one great poet more was the "Lay of the Last Minstrel." It was published in 1805, after he had greatly strengthened the favourable opinion of his antiquarian friends by the production of "Sir Tristrem," a metrical romance, and the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border." How impossible it is at this period of time to enter into the feelings of the reading public, when a work so perfectly new in its style and structure was presented to their notice! Nothing had been heard for a long time but the tame correctness of Hayley and Darwin, to which had succeeded a short time before the strange and little-understood efforts of the Lake school, as it

was called, to invest the most trifling transactions of daily life with a poetic character, upon the true axiom, which, however, they had pushed to a ludicrous extreme, that truth and simplicity are the great elements of Poetry. The Sir Oracle of the Edinburgh Review, whom it was the fashion to praise as the best and most ingenious of critics, but whose verdicts have had the misfortune to be very generally reversed, had lost no time in showing his pitiful wit on the appearance of the lyrical ballads of Wordsworth. And now there was sent forth into the world a book of many thousand lines, which was in reality little more than a prodigious ballad, in a style far more natural, far more simple, far more withdrawn from the regular singsong of the prevailing versification than Wordsworth or Coleridge had ever ventured upon. The critics, as might be expected, were cold and dissatisfied. They fell back upon their rules and axioms—their wise saws and modern instances-talked of the inequalities in the performance, and sneered at the supernatural machinery, the necromancers and goblins of the story. But who cared for critics or criticisms? Here was a book that enthralled the reader's attention, whether he would or no, whether old or young, whether learned or ignorant. It appealed to the universal feelings. There was curiosity in the narrative, interest in

the characters, pleasure in the versification; and the origin of it all was this. The Countess of Dalkeith had heard a curious tale of Border witchcraft, and asked the poet to make it the subject of a ballad. The materials grew on him. as he extended his subject beyond the first hint of the Countess, and embraced the whole character of the time,-battles with feast and roundelay intermixed, till at last it got beyond the ballad size and became an independent poem. But how was the consolidating process to be effected, and the different parts combined into one? The happy idea struck him of a wandering Minstrel, the last of all his kind, relating the incidents of the poem to the Duchess of Buccleugh, the ancestress of the lady who had originally suggested the tale, and by this simple artifice the unity of the work is preserved.

The way was long, the wind was cold,
The Minstrel was infirm and old;
His wither'd cheek and tresses gray
Seemed to have known a better day.
The harp, his sole remaining joy,
Was carried by an orphan boy.
The last of all the bards was he,
Who sang of Border chivalry.
For, well-a-day! their date was fled,
His tuneful brethren all were dead,
And he, neglected and opprest,
Wished to be with them, and at rest.