thought might properly be employed in a work not immediately connected with my pastoral labors.

In the recollection of the past portions of my life, I refer to these morning hours,—to the stillness and quiet of my room in this house of God when I have been permitted to prevent the dawning of the morning" in the study of the Bible, while the inhabitants of this great city were slumbering round about me, and before the cares of the day and its direct responsibilities came upon me,- I refer, I say, to these scenes as among the happiest portions of my life ; and I could not do a better thing in reference to my younger brethren in the ministry, than to commend this habit to them as one closely connected with their own personal piety, and their usefulness in the world.

Life at Three-Score.

ROBERT C. SANDS, 1799–1832. ROBERT C. SANDS was born in the city of New York, May 11, 1799. He entored the Sophomore class in Columbia College in 1812, and was graduated, with a high reputation for scholarship, in 1815. He soon after began the study of law in the office of David B. Ogden, entering upon his new course of study with great ardor, and pursuing it with steady zeal. He had formed in college an intimate friendship with James Eastburn, afterwards a clergyman of the Protestant Episcopal Church; and in 1817 he commenced, in conjunction with his clerical friend, a romantic poem, founded on the history of Philip, the celebrated Sachem of the Pequods. But Mr. Eastburn's health began to fail early in 1819, and he died in December of that year, before the work was completed. It was therefore revised, arranged, and completed, with many additions, by Sands, who introduced it with a touching proem, in which the surviving poet mourned, in elevated and feeling strains, the accomplished friend of his youth. The poem was published, under the title of Yamoyden, at New York, in 1820, was received with high commendation, and gave Mr. Sands great literary reputation throughout the United States.

In 1820, Mr. Sands was admitted to the bar, and opened an office in the city of New York; but his ardent love of general literature gradually weaned him from his profession. In 1822 and 1823, he wrote many articles for the “Literary Review," a monthly periodical, and in 1824 the “Atlantic Magazine" was established and placed under his charge. He gave it up in six months; but when it became changed to the “ New York Review," he was engaged as an editor, and assisted in conducting it till 1827. He had now become an author by profession, and looked to his pen for support, as he had before looked to it for fame or for amusement; and when an offer of a liberal salary was made him as an assistant editor of the “New York Commercial Advertiser," he accepted it, and continued his connection with that journal until his death, wbich took place on the 17th of December, 1832; in the mean time editing and writing a

great number of miscellaneous works. A selection from his works was published in 1834, in two volumes, ootavo, entitled Writings in Prose and Verse, with a Memoir.

FROM THE PROEM TO YAMOYDEN.

Go forth, sad fragments of a broken strain,

The last that either bard shall e'er essay:
The hand can ne'er attempt the chords again

That first awoke them in a happier day:
Where sweeps the ocean-breeze its desert way,
His requiem murmurs o'er the moaning wave;

And he who feebly now prolongs the lay
Shall ne'er the minstrel's hallow'd honors crave;
His harp lies buried deep in that untimely grave !"
Friend of my youth! with thee began the love

Of sacred song; the wont, in golden dreams,
'Mid classic realms of splendors past to rove,

O'er haunted steep, and by immortal streams;

Where the blue wave, with sparkling bosom, gleams
Round shores, the mind's eternal heritage,

Forever lit by memory's twilight beams;
Where the proud dead, that live in storied page,
Beckon, with awful port, to glory's earlier age.
There would we linger oft, entranced, to hear,

O'er battle-fields, the epic thunders roll;
Or list, where tragic wail upon the ear

Through Argive palaces shrill echoing stole;

There would we mark, uncurb'd by all control,
In central heaven, the Theban eagle's flight;

Or hold communion with the musing soul
Of sage or bard, who sought, 'mid pagan night,
In loved Athenian groves, for truth's eternal light.

Friend of my youth! with thee began my song,

And o'er thy bier its latest accents die;
Misled in phantom-peopled realms too long-

Though not to me the muse averse deny,

Sometimes, perhaps, her visions to descry-
Such thriftless pastime should with youth be o'er;

And he who loved with thee his notes to try,
But for thy sake such idlesse would deplore-
And swears to meditate the thankless muse no more.

T“That American literature experienced a great loss in the early death of Sands, will be felt by the reader who makes acquaintance with his well-cultivated, prompt, exuberant genius, which promised, had life been spared, a distinguished career of genial mental activity and productiveness."-DUYCKINCK.

A series of interesting papers on the early and unpublished writings of this "true son of genius" may be found in the twenty-first and twenty-second volumes of the "Knickerbocker Magazine."

? Mr. Eastburn died December, 1819, on a voyage to Santa Cruz, undertaken to regain his health.

ODE TO EVENING.

Hail! sober evening! thee the harass'd brain

And aching heart with fond orisons greet;
The respite thou of toil; the balm of pain;

To thoughtful mind the hour for musing meet:
'Tis then the sage, from forth his lone retreat,
The rolling universe around espies;

'Tis then the bard may hold communion sweet With lovely shapes, unkenn'd by grosser eyes, And quick perception comes of finer mysteries.

The silent hour of bliss! when in the west

Her argent cresset lights the star of love :-
The spiritual hour! when creatures blest

Unseen return o'er former haunts to rove;

While sleep his shadowy mantle spreads above,
Sleep, brother of forgetfulness and death,

Round well-known couch with noiseless tread they rove,
In tones of heavenly music comfort breathe,
And tell what weal or bale shall chance the moon beneath.

Hour of devotion! like a distant sea,

The world's loud voices faintly murmuring die ;
Responsive to the spheral harmony,

While grateful hymns are borne from earth on high.

Oh! who can gaze on yon unsullied sky,
And not grow purer from the heavenward view ?

As those, the Virgin Mother's meek, full eye
Who met, if uninspired lore be true,
Felt a new birth within, and sin no longer knew.

Let others hail the oriflamme of morn,

O'er kindling hills unfurl'd with gorgeous dyes !
O, mild, blue Evening! still to thee I turn,

With holier thought, and with undazzled eyes ;

Where wealth and power with glare and splendor rise,
Let fools and slaves disgustful incense burn!

Still Memory's moonlight lustre let me prize;
The great, the good, whose course is o'er, discern,
And, from their glories past, time's mighty lessons learn!

From “ Yamoyden."

MONODY ON SAMUEL PATCH."

“By water shall he die, and take his end."-SHAKSPEARE.

Toll for Sam Patch! Sam Patch, who jumps no more,

This or the world to come. Sam Patch is dead!
The vulgar pathway to the unknown shore

Of dark futurity, he would not tread.

1 Samuel Patch was a boatman on the Erie Canal, in New York. He made himself notorious by leaping from the masts of ships, from the Falls of Niagara,

No friends stood sorrowing round his dying bed ;
Nor, with decorous woe, sedately stepp'd

Behind his corpse, and tears by retail shed ;-
The mighty river, as it onward swept,
In one great, wholesale sob, his body drown's and kept.

Toll for Sam Patch! he scorn'd the common way

That leads to fame, up heights of rough ascent,
And having heard Pope and Longinus say,

That some great men had risen to falls, he went

And jump'd where wild Passaic's waves had rent
The antique rocks; the air free passage gave,

And graciously the liquid element
Upbore him, like some sea-god on its wave;
And all the people said that Sam was very brave.

Fame, the clear spirit that doth to heaven upraise,

Led Sam to dive into what Byron calls
The hell of waters. For the sake of praise.

He woo'd the bathos down great waterfalls;

The dizzy precipice, which the eye appalls
Of travellers for pleasure, Samuel found

Pleasant, as are to women lighted halls
Cramm'd full of fools and fiddles; to the sound
Of the eternal roar, he timed his desperate bound.
Sam was a fool. But the large world of such

Has thousands,-better taught, alike absurd,
And less sublime. Of fame he soon got much,

Where distant cataracts spout, of him men heard.

Alas for Sam! Had he aright preferr'd
The kindly element to which he gave

Himself so fearlessly, we had not heard
That it was now his winding-sheet and grave,
Nor sung, 'twixt tears and smiles, our requiem for the brave.
I say, the muse shall quite forget to sound

The chord whose music is undying, if
She do not strike it when Sam Patch is drown'd.

Leander dived for love. Leucadia's cliff

The Lesbian Sappho leap'd from in a miff,
To punish Phaon; Icarus went dead,

Because the wax did not continue stiff ;
And, had he minded what his father said,
He had not given a name unto his watery bed.

And Helle's case was all an accident,

As everybody knows. Why sing of these?

and from the Falls in the Genesee River, at Rochester. He did this, as he said, to show " that some things can be done as well as others;" and hence this, now, proverbial phrase. His last feat was in the summer of 1831, when, in the presence of many thousands, he jurnped from above the highest rock over which the water falls in the Genesee, and was lost. He had drank too freely before · going upon the scaffold, and lost his balance in descending. The above verses were written a few days after this event.

Nor would I rank with Sam that man who went

Down into Ætna's womb-Empedocles

I think he call'd himself. Themselves to please, Or else unwillingly, they made their springs;

For glory in the abstract, Sam made his, To prove to all men, commons, lords, and kings, That “ some things may be done as well as other things."

And while Niagara prolongs its thunder,

Though still the rock primeval disappears, And nations change their bounds—the theme of wonder

Shall Sam go down the cataract of long years;

And if there be sublimity in tears,
Those shall be precious which the adventurer shed

When his frail star gave way, and waked his fears
Lest by the ungenerous crowd it might be said
That he was all a hoax, or that his pluck had fled.

Who would compare the maudlin Alexander,

Blubbering, because he had no job in hand, Acting the hypocrite, or else the gander,

With Sam, whose grief we all can understand ?

His crying was not womanish, nor plann'd For exhibition; but his heart o'erswell'd

With its own agony, when he the grand Natural arrangements for a jump beheld, And, measuring the cascade, found not his courage quellid

But, ere he leap'd, he begg'd of those who made

Money by his dread venture, that if he Should perish, such collection should be paid

As might be pick'd up from the “ company"

To his mother. This, his last request, shall be
Though she who bore him ne'er his fate should know-

An iris, glittering o'er his memory,
When all the streams have worn their barriers low,
And, by the sea drunk up, forever cease to flow.

Therefore it is considered, that Sam Patch

Shall never be forgot in prose or rhyme; His name shall be a portion in the batch

Of the heroic dough, which baking Time

Kneads for consuming ages—and the chime Of Fame's old bells, long as they truly ring,

Shall tell of him: he dived for the sublime, And found it. Thou, who with the eagle's wing, Being a goose, wouldst fly,-dream not of such a thing!