every honest and pure mind-that, while it exhibits powers of description unusually great, and is full of passages of exquisite beauty, it cannot, as a whole, be read without the most injurious influence upon the moral sensibilities. The tendency of it is to shake our confidence in virtue, and to diminish our abhorrence of vice; to palliate crime, and to unsettle our notions of right and wrong. "Humiliating was the waste and degradation of his genius, and melancholy is the power which his poetry has exerted upon multitudes of minds. The moral tendency of some of his poems is exceedingly pernicious: his complete works ought never to be purchased, and we may feel proud not to be acquainted with them, except by extracts and beauties." Indeed, if any one should possess the fiendish desire to break down the principles of virtue in any young man or young woman, the best way to begin would be to put a copy of Byron's works into the hands of the destined victim. "Fore-warned-fore-armed."1 THE DYING GLADIATOR.2 The seal is set.-Now welcome, thou dread power! Both are but theatres where the chief actors rot. "I admire the sublimity of his genius. But I have feared, and do still fear, the consequences the inevitable consequences of his writings. I fear, that in our enthusiastic admiration of genius, our idolatry of poetry, the awful impiety and the staggering unbelief contained in those writings are lightly passed over, and acquiesced in, as the allowable aberrations of a master intellect, which had lifted itself above the ordinary world, which had broken down the harriers of ordinary mind, and which revelled in a creation of its own: a world, over which the sunshine of imagination lightened at times with an almost ineffable glory, to be succeeded by the thick blackness of doubt, and terror, and misanthropy, relieved only by the lightning flashes of terrible and unholy passion."-J. G. WHittier. 2 We read with horror the accounts of the barbarous and brutal gladiatorial exhibitions among the Romans; and were not the historical evidence irrefutable, we could hardly believe that in one city alone (Capua) forty thousand were kept, and fed, and trained to butcher each other for the gratification of the Roman people. But let us be honest, and not have too much self complacency. "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull the mote out of thy brother's eye." How do modern military "schools"-(our ludi gladiatorii)—among so-called Christian nations, differ in principle from the ancient? Are not young men trained in them, for years, to learn the art of human butchery-to learn how to kill their fellow-men most scientifically? May the day speedily come when our land, by utterly abolishing such establishments, shall set, in this respect, a Christian example to all the nations of the earth! I see before me the gladiator lie: He leans upon his hand; his manly brow And his droop'd head sinks gradually low; Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hail'd the wretch who won. He heard it, but he heeded not; his eyes All this rush'd with his blood. Shall he expire, APOSTROPHE TO THE OCEAN. There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, I love not man the less, but nature more, What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal. His steps are not upon thy paths-thy fields And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies, And dashest him again to earth: there let him lay. Their clay creator the vain title take Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war: These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake, Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee- Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form Calm or convulsed-in breeze, or gale, or storm, Dark-heaving; boundless, endless, and sublime- Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime The monsters of the deep are made; each zone And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy NIGHT AT CORINTH.1 'Tis midnight: on the mountains brown And scarce their foam the pebbles shook, But murmur'd meekly as the brook. In 1715, Corinth, then in the possession of the Venetians, was besieged by the Turks. In the "Siege of Corinth," Byron describes one of the delicious nights of that fine climate. The winds were pillow'd on the waves; A CALM NIGHT AT LAKE GENEVA. Clear, placid Leman! thy contrasted lake, To waft me from distraction; once I loved That I with stern delights should e'er have been so moved. It is the hush of night, and all between Thy margin and the mountains, dusk, yet clear, There breathes a living fragrance, from the shore, At intervals, some bird from out the brakes AN ALPINE STORM AT LAKE GENEVA. The sky is changed!-and such a change! Oh night, The Muezzin's voice. The Turks do not use bells to summon the religious to their devotions. They have an appointed person whose function it is to send forth, to the extent of his voice, the call to wonted prayer. From peak to peak, the rattling crags among, Leaps the live thunder! Not from one lone cloud, But every mountain now hath found a tongue, And Jura answers, through her misty shroud, Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud! And this is in the night :-most glorious night! Thou wert not sent for slumber! let me be A sharer in thy fierce and far delightA portion of the tempest and of thee! How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea, And the big rain comes dancing to the earth! And now again 'tis black-and now, the glee Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth, As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth. MODERN GREECE. He who hath bent him o'er the dead, Ere the first day of death is fled, Have swept the lines where beauty lingers,) The rapture of repose that's there, The fix'd, yet tender traits that streak The languor of the placid cheek, That fires not, wins not, weeps not, now, Where cold obstruction's apathy The doom he dreads, yet dwells upon; So fair, so calm, so softly seal'd, The first, last look by death reveal'd! 'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more! So coldly sweet, so deadly fair, We start, for soul is wanting there. That parts not quite with parting breath; But beauty with that fearful bloom, A gilded halo hovering round decay, The farewell beam of feeling past away! Spark of that flame, perchance of heavenly birth, Which gleams, but warms no more its cherish'd earth! |