To wield sweet verse, or e'en well-painting speech, And, faith outworking from far names sublime, To thy young heart's first creed of virtue cling, Nor stoop to think her an unreal thing; Oh! prize those dreams, oh! guard that crced of thine; To clasp, at silent eve, at unwatched morn, But let not garish day detect to scorn." Pretension has been let off a little too easily; but as she is a voluminous and fashionable writer of the present day, and meddles in all matters, and all subjects, the reader will not be sorry to see her a little smartly snubbed, and her pen split, so that hereafter, as somebody says, it may open its wide mouth and speak less. "So fame is won. Nor only Poct's rhyme Must feed on flowers and flutter in sublime; But, like false head that froths on sickly beer, When drugs belie sweet malt and hop austere, Church briefs themselves with tropes are mantling o'er, And humble prose is humble prose no more, Yet strip, more oft, from each its fine brocade, How mean the mould of thought beneath displayed! In youthful hose too wide for shrunken shanks; Giant or huge Bonassus, from his lair To find that In and Out unlike so much." Our author in his rage at the perversion of the Muse's art, would gladly go back to the days, ere writing was known-ages well described. The allusion to Cadmus is classical and good. "So sped th' unwriting age-Came Cadmus then, To leave in doubt if worse his lettered pen, Or serpents' teeth that grew to armèd men." He would not, however, be content to remain long in those unlettered ages for of the revival of literature he speaks with rapture. "O matchless line of years, whose generous strife Then Oracles, that stirred young Raphael's breast, The teeming Press-no longer to be called Minerva, for she was not prolific and ours bears not the mark of coming from Jove's head!!-who can possibly keep any pace with the literature of our age? Prolific literature, the litter of the Press! Monsters and prodigies of every shape and size from the big at their birth, to the blushing cherub with albums for wings. We wonder not at our author's praise of the Caliph Omar, with which he concludes his satire, and with which we close our quotations from it. "Come back, long-toiling Faust! come back and see Count o'er its mingled fruits of joy and pain, B. The ground thus cleared, you plant your own instead, Those to whom the roughness of satire gives no relish, may walk forth with Mr Kenyon into the soft moonlight, and find a kindred spirit. But they must bargain for the scene, for in his moonlight excursions he is ubiquitous, and thinks little of a flight from the West Indies to Mola di Gaeta. The tenderness in the following lines is very exquisite, it is evidently engendered by love, and offered in a Poet's worship to the moon; and the moon repays the gift with her lucid quiet, and thrilling influence; felt and acknowledged in "The silent eye, And silent pressure of each linked arm.” Even lovers are hard-hearted in the broad noon, and have their little dif ferences of opinion. But the rising moon and the quiet night give more than reconciliation. But to those who have never differed, whose all is love, and they all loving, what are such a scene and time as this? "Such eve, Such blessed eve was ours, when last we stood Scarce lisping up the sand, crept to the ear, Sole sound; nor did we break the calm with movement, Or sacrilege of word; but stayed in peace, Of thee expectant. And what need had been Of voiced language, when the silent eye, And silent pressure of each linkèd arm, Spoke more than utterance? Nay, whose tongue might tell For thy whito feet to tread on: and, ere long- To the pale olive-tree, or, yet, more near us, Till the whole grew to one expanded sense Where the Soul breathed as native, and mere Body We should have preferred the termination at "native"-the Body being sublimed to Spirit, if it be not rather in the vein of nonsense, is superfluous; the soul, in its native atmosphere of love, expresses all that can reasonably be meant by the addition. A poet less ob servant of the scenery of nature, and too many are, would have made up two magnificent descriptions of sunlight and moonlight, but would never have thought of letting them see each other's faces and who ever paints this double aspect, which is yet so beautiful? "We too behold thee, With untired eye fixed upward; scarce regarding Who made, alone, the hills, and seas, and skies, We cannot forbear quoting the last lines of this piece, because they give an interest to the whole that could not be without them. They are as the pearl in Dian's crescent "Once more that tomb hath opened! and She, who, It is essential, or nearly so, to the poet to have a musical ear-many, who are not gifted with this efflatu numinis, still love to pour forth their meditations, and even their conversations, in a certain rhythm. Mr. Kenyon probably thinks in something very like blank verse; perhaps the structure comes ready to his utterance. The poet himself, so gifted, is too apt to think all his thoughts and reflections so uttered, poetry; when, without the dress which gave them the charm, they would be but passing and less observed notices. There are many pieces of moral meditation in the volume; which, though good as musical prose, and just in conception, yet lack the Muse's stamp.Sentimental writers are very apt to fall into this (we may call it) error, and mistake the music of their thoughts for the very pith and marrow of sense, and perhaps invention. In the full feeling of his own heart the poet as cribes the tale and elegy of the nightingale's song to the unconscious bird; so does he often fancy that he has expressed all he feels and thinks when he has given but the pleasing air. We venture to suggest this to the notice of Mr. Kenyon, that, in any subsequent edition, he may revise some of these pieces, and more concentrate what is really poetical; they would tell more forcibly. The above remarks are, however, not applicable to the last piece in his volume, "the Streams," which is poetical in its first conception, and in the execution; it has something of the nature of narrative, current with the great moral-and the poetry is preserved. The two streams are, The Heathen Mythology and Revelation; the course of both is diversely and appropriately marked, even from their fountains. "From Siloa this, and this from Hippocrene." The beautiful fable, the lighter graces of the Mytho logy are set off with all their charms. in the joyous worship along its flowery The utter loss of "this from Hippocrene," that "With sudden plunge flung itself under ground," and the despair of those who delighted banks, are very happy in conception, and finely contrasted with the steady and solemn lapse of that holy stream into its eternal sea, where "rode anchor'd barks." (Not by such fabled forms as Charon old, But by Angelic Natures piloted,) Th' awaiting pilgrims o'er its rough or smooth (For not to all the passage was the same) Safely to waft; while from that very shore All might behold what lovely regions rose Beyond in the horizon; fair as clouds, The fairest ever hung in western sky, But not like them to fade; eternal dwellings Of Spirits who had passed and landed there!" Of the minor poems or pieces, as they are usually called in most poetical publications, it is perhaps scarcely fair, to speak in censure; and how seldom can we bestow much praise! Many of them owe their charm, in the poet's own estimation, to associations which attach them to his heart, but, therefore, remove them from his judgment. We more particularly allude to all those which owe their perhaps too sudden birth to the early passion of love. We almost wish they were universally held sacred for the eyes of those for whom they were written; and as they are commonly written upon the eyes, or talk much about them, we see no rea son why they should be robbed of their perquisite. But if the authors persist in sending them into the world, we do wish from our hearts that the more judicious publishers would impannel a jury of matrons to decide upon their propriety, who might take a retrospec tive view of all the exaggerations, oaths and promises, and test them, as they would other sweetmeats, by their keeping, with full powers to discard; provided that such jury were under strict oath to declare that none of them were written to themselves. We should be happy to drink with Mr. Kenyon a glass or two of his favourite CHAMPAGNE ROSE. "Praise who will the duller liquor, Thee--a spell for mortal sorrow, And while they plied their task united, TRANQUILLITY IN IRELAND. In the papers of a few days since, we have the report of a meeting of the magistrates of the county of Tipperary, which, as being one of the most Popish counties of Ireland, is, of course, the most lawless, furious, and bloody. The magistrates, consisting of all the principal men of the county, with Lord Donoughmore, the Lord-Lieutenant, at their head, addressed the Viceroy for protection, represented life and property as wholly at the mercy of the villains who have been let loose on them by the spirit of insurrection, ! and declared the county to be in a state verging on utter ruin. They came to this meeting generally armed, in some instances, with their arms visible. The Lord-Lieutenant closed the meeting as early as possible, observing that he did so, "that gentlemen might be able to reach their homes before nightfall." And this is the country for which Popery pledged its pacification. How can English commerce or English capital venture there? How far is such a state of society at this moment from open war? Even this formidable question is scarcely left dubious. The Dublin Evening Post, the Government organ in Ireland, pronounces that the crisis has come, and fiercely recommends "Agitation." We have in it, of late, long and laboured appeals on the theme -"We must agitate." "The nation must be agitated anew." Agitation must go through the island." 66 May not we of this island, being plain men, venture to ask, what is the object of all this labour of agitation? There is no such want of either feeling or tongue in the Irish peasant, that, if he is aggrieved, he cannot comprehend his injury, and speak of it loudly. In England, if we find any thing to complain of, we complain; if nothing, we hold our peace. We ask, why the same process may not exist in Ireland? Why, if the peasantry are the most suffering, unhappy, broken, and so forth race on earth, as the orators inform us, do they require all this agitation to make them say so? Why, if their chains still clank on their legs; and why, if they feel themselves deprived of law, and bound hand and foot in the links of British iniquity, &c. &c., cannot they be left to say something of this for themselves, without being assembled by placards and cows' horns, and gathered on commons, and marched by platoons into market towns, and listening to three hours' harangues, merely to know that they are desperately unhappy? We should think, that to make this discovery, they might be trusted to their own ideas of discomfort. And that where they did not complain until they were ordered to do so, the unhappiness was not of a very severe species. In short, that the man is not much hurt who does not feel it, and that there is a considerable probability of his not feeling much where he says nothing on the subject. We admit that this silence would be by no means to the advantage of the O'Connell dynasty. If the populace do not riot, what becomes of the rent? If orators do not itinerate and madden the country day by day, what becomes of murder and robbery night by night? and, if robbery and murder are no more, who can doubt that the death-warrant of the party is signed? Therefore agitate, agitate, agitate," is their policy and their proverb; hurry through the land, summoning the people from their work, and defrauding them of their wages, and swear to them by the Virgin, and all their other gods and goddesses of wood and stone, that they are the most wretched of human beings, however they may not have found it out for themselves; that the chief want of the Irish peasant is to be able to vote for a Popish member; or, in process of time, to be a member himself; and that, until Ballot, Triennial Parlia ments, and Repeal are gained, he ought not to lay his head on his pillow, or the pike out of his hand. The haranguers, who vociferate all this sanguinary falsehood, know in their souls that the ef fect is, and will be, the infinite riot, mischief, and misery which overspread the Popish provinces of Ireland. what is it all to them? The word still is agitate, agitate, agitate." "This," said the Duke of Wellington, in his public rebuke to one of the silliest of peers, "means nothing in But |