as well as that revolting catalogue which Shelley describes with more power than correct taste in "The Sensitive Plant:"—

"Between the time of the wind and the snow, All loathliest weeds began to grow, Whose coarse leaves were splashed with many a speck,

Like the water snake's belly and the toad's back.

"And thistles, and nettles, and darnels rank, And the dock, and henbane, and hemlock dank,

Stretch'd out its long and hollow shank, And stifled the air till the dead wind stank.

"And plants at whose names the verse feels loath,

Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth,

Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue,

Livid and starred with a lurid dew.

"And agarics and fungi, with mildew and mould,

Started like mist from the wet ground cold;

Pale, fleshy, as if the decaying dead, With a spirit of growth had been animated !"

A ghastly description, that reminds one of Milton's terrific enumeration of diseases in the "Paradise Lost." "Wild flowers" is a name altogether expressive of natural and unforced perfection; none of our poets will object to figure in this interesting class, if they share in the certain immortality which Nature and Wordsworth promise their namesakes.

"Pansies, lilies, kingcups, daisies,

Let them live upon their praises;
Long as there's a sun that sets,
Primroses will have their glory;
Long as there are violets,

They will have a place in story."

"Waste paper," indeed, seems the severest cut of all; but even this has its uses and its triumphs. Has not Tennyson, in the seventy-fifth elegy of his "In Memoriam," immortalised some of them? rather prosaically, it must be confessed, but perhaps designedly so, the better to harmonise with the ideas.

"These mental lullabies of pain," he says, speaking of his own elegiacs

"May bind a book, may line a box,

May serve to curl a maiden's locks." There is comfort for you, oh! unread rhymers, and be content. We do not profess to give our specimens in the order of our classification; that, and the proper place and destiny of each, we leave to the intelligence and mercy of the reader.

To begin our lecture, we beg to present to the reader a little volume* from the press of the English disciple. of Aldus.

The first poem in the collection, "The Diamond Rock," possesses, we fear, but little of the brilliancy of the one material or the durability of the other. It is a ballad, written, evidently, with a notion that it would take its place beside, if it did not su"The Ancient Mariner," or persede, "The Old Woman of Berkeley;" but with an unconscious comicality, which Coleridge never aimed at, and which Southey, with all his forced efforts at juvenile jocularity, never reached. In fact, reader, we have laughed more over this little volume of downright serious versification, than over the most brilliant sallies of the greatest wits. Had Philip the Second beheld us, as we burst into thunderous cachinnations, he would have attributed our hilarity either to insanity or Cervantes. Had La Foret (Moliere's domestic critic and housekeeper) been present, she would be satisfied that nothing but the Malade Imaginaire of her hen-pecked and illustrious master could have produced such merriment. It has been our fate, like Swift,

"To laugh and shake in Rabelais' easy chair," and like "the million" with Lorrequer and Sam Weller, in their several uneasy positions; but nothing can express how we laughed, except the lines which Shelley puts into the idealised mouth of Mother Earth, in the last act of the "Prometheus Unbound:"

"Ha ha! the caverns of my hollow mountains, My cloven fire crags, sound-exulting fountains, Laugh with a vast and inextinguishable laughter!"

A true hero is unknown to his valet de chambre; a true genius to himself;

and the most solemn and lugubrious perpetrator of platitudes is unconscious of the inexhaustible fund of comicality within him; and if not funny himself, how successfully he can be the cause of fun in others.

Toreturn to "The Diamond Rock."

"This poem," says the author, "is founded on one of the most singular exploits in the naval history of Britain. I allude to the defence of the Diamond Rock,' by Captain Maurice and his gallant comrades, on the 31st May, and 1st and 2nd June, 1805, an exploit alike remarkable for the extraordinary force employed in the attack, and the intrepidity with which the posts was defended by the British. It was, moreover, the sole achievement of the memorable expedition under Admiral Villeneuve, by whom the proceedings were witnessed from the contiguous shore of Martinique."

The poem commences abruptly with the following extraordinary gymnastic feat of the French captain :

"'Twas a morn in May, when across the bay
The captain his spy-glass he threw ;
The sun was steeping the Diamond Rock
In streams of purple and blue."

Why the captain should have thrown away his glass at all, and how he could have thrown it so far as across the wide bay of Port Royal, we are equally at a loss to imagine. It must, we suppose, have been the excess of military ardour which so fired him, that he was enabled to do, in that moment of excitement, what, on ordinary occasions, would have been impossible and injudicious. After throwing away his glass in this very extraordinary manner, he informs his men of what he was about. "Up! up! my lads! your anchors weigh, We steer for the Diamond Rock; A bolt, a bar, a shell, a spar—

We'll take her by twelve of the clock. "A voice in the ship then spoke aloud,

'Beware of the spectre, beware—'”

A storm was evidently rising, for

"The captain scowl'd, the wind it howl'd," and worse than all,

"The commodore 'gan to swear. "The commodore-Oh, he did lustily swear, A thundering oath swore he; I'll take the Rock by twelve of the clock, Or the devil he may take me!"

Neither event, however desirable, happened for three days, for owing, we suppose, to the inconsiderate loss of the captain's glass, the "Diamond Peak," which was described as a very conspicuous object in the first stanza, could not be discovered: then, though

"Some pull'd long, and some row'd strong, " It was all the same, for they all pull'd wrong,

if we may be allowed to complete the couplet by a line of our own.

At length being at sea (in every sense of the word) for some time, quite unexpectedly

"The Diamond Rock, without shiver or shock,

Stood gallantly forth to view."

We cannot linger on the observations of the crew on the wonderful fact of discovering a place within a looking three days; not even the exmile of shore, for which they were

clamation of that brave mariner,

"Who stoutly averr'd

The Rock it was surely haunted—”

but come at once to the grand attack:

"In France's name we come to claim
This Diamond for her crown;
If you don't yield the fortress up,
We'll pull the fortress down.”

Now we think, in the annals of military or naval strategy, there never was an ultimatum that could rival in directness, perspicuity, and terseness, that contained in the two lines we have italicised. They express, without any possibility of misconception, the entire object of the expedition, the determination of the besiegers, the danger of resistance, and the penalty of defeat. Cæsar had but to come, see, and conquer. Cromwell was famous for the pithy and uncomfortable brevity with which he dictated terms to his enemies. Napoleon was somewhat more rhetorical, but equally forcible. The famous ultimatum of the Volunteers, "or else" was highly suggestive, though slightly vague. But the language of the French captain, or commodore (for as we shall presently find it was the latter), surpasses them all.

Neither are the English behind the French in the directness of their reply;

in fact many of our readers will give them the preference. With the honest bluntness of bold Britons they simply rely upon their right of possession, which they are determined to retain.

"By Ocean's Powers the gem is ours,

And ours it still shall be."

There is a weakness in the phrase "Ocean's Powers," which would never have been used if it were an Irish regiment that was on the rock. How energetically then would the reply have been given, and that with a very slight change of expression

"No! by the Powers! the gem is ours,

And ours it still shall be."

But whatever doubt there may be as to the directness of the language used, there can be none about the action that followed. Had James II.'s gunner acted with the same promptness beside "the Boyne's ill-fated river," how different the destiny of these kingdoms.

"A shot with that, laid the commodore flat,
Flat on the deck lay he;
The sailors raised the bleeding corpse,
And cast it into the sea.'

The battle now begins in right

earnest.

"And every man that falls in the van,

Is pitch'd overboard stiff and stark: And every corpse in the wave that drops Is swallowed by a shark.

"And up at the fort, as if in sport,

The foeman his cannon discharges; The splinters of stone come down with a groan,

And shiver his fragile barges.

"And every man that falls in the fort

Is cast away to the rear;

The vultures o'erhead pounce down on the dead,

And bear them off to their lair."

"Truth is stranger than fiction." Here we have a fact stated that far surpasses the wonders of Sinbad's narratives, if indeed it be not an important testimony to their veracity. Our readers will recollect (at least such of them as are young in years and heart), that in the second voyage of that indefatigable traveller, he, being left behind by his companions on a desert island,

crouched down beside an enormous egg, and tying himself to the claw of the gigantic bird (the Roc), to which it belonged, was carried away to the valley of Diamonds. Strange now if we have, most unexpectedly, stumbled on the exact spot to which the dear old friend and companion of our childhood was borne. The reasoning, to our mind, is conclusive. "The Diamond Rock" is either a mere fanciful appellation, to which any other similar cluster would have an equal claim, or it was given designedly from some sufficient cause hitherto unexplained or forgotten. We have it on the respectable authority of Sinbad, that he was carried by a bird called a Roc into a valley of Diamonds. We have it on the equally respectable authority of Mr. Breen, that on the island called by the French Roche, or Roc du Diamant, the vultures are so exceedingly strong as to be able to carry the corses of the slain "off to their lair." Is it not conclusive, notwithstanding some ornithological confusion on either side, that this was the identical spot where the singular story related by Sinbad occurred, and that it preserves the memory of the bird and of the valley in the very name it bears? At any rate, the coincidence is very striking, and we beg to offer the discovery to Mr. Lane, who, no doubt, will follow up the idea in the notes to his next edition of the Thousand and one Nights.

To return to the poem; after three or four days of desperate fighting, the combatants, both French and English, disappeared with almost the entire completeness of the Kilkenny cats, leaving nothing but the tale of their heroism behind them. On both sides, to use the strong image of the poet—

"They dropp'd away, like blasted hay, Before the tempest's scourge."

Three sailors, and our first acquaintance, the captain, were

"The only remuant left."

These at length emerge from a cleft in the rock, where they had concealed themselves; and, climbing to the walls of the fort, remove the rifled Union Jack, and in its place they "hoist the tricolór ;" and then, as quickly as possible, endeavoured to reach the

"With clash and din around they spin

The Diamond's edge they near,
And over the steep, down into the deep,
They plunge, and disappear."

And so with this catastrophe we shall take our leave of the "Diamond Rock."

We must cull a few scattered flowers before we present to our readers two perfect gems, of "purest ray serene." In a poem called "The Island Home," dedicated especially to the honour of St. Lucia, of which our poet is the historian, he describes it as being thus comfortably situated :—

"My loved tropic land

Pillowed round on volcano,
By hurricane fanned."

Notwithstanding these slight drawbacks, it is better off than one would imagine :

"On the ocean thou sleepest,
In halcyon repose,

And the earthquake that rocks there
But calms thy heart-throes."

The useful invention of "gas" is a great favourite with our author, and frequently supplies him with a brilliant illustration. Thus in the present

poem, he says, still speaking of his island home:

"Where the humming-bird's sheen
And the firefly's green light
Are the gas that illume thee,
My homestead so bright."

And in the ode "To a Firefly," p. 32, written in the same measure as Shelley's "Ode to a Skylark," we have the following:

"Shell of ancient Tara, (?)

Tamed Aladdin's

Hummingbird's tiara,

gas (!)

Glowworm in the grass,

These, and all else of earth, thy lustrous powers surpass."

We think Shelley's personal representative should take an action against Mr. Breen, for unlawfully using that poet's meter in his manufacture of illustrations from gas. In "The Earthquake," p. 22, we have this new and striking image:

"As bearded with brimstone, the pent thunders roll,

And boils the broad caldron from centre to pole."

We can now understand what the poets mean by "the barbed" lightning. In "A last Dirge for Erin" his phraseology becomes more Irish than the Irish itself:

"Erin! thy summer is flown;

Shed its delight:

Ochone! Ochone! Ochone!
Thy misery's doleful moan
Would move a heart of stone,

Nature despite."

"The Iron Age" is a poem in praise of that useful metal; and everything, even to the "Iron Duke," that really or metaphorically bears on the subject is introduced. We can only give two uses to which it is put:

"With iron the husbandman turns the sod, With iron the fisherman hooks his cod!"

In "The Song of the Slave," p. 43, he enters the lists with Burns, as he had previously done with Coleridge, Southey, and Shelley; and, as usual, comes off victorious. What is there in "Scots wha ha'e" equal to this?-

"Midnight, midnight; mark the hour; Darkness shrouds the beacon tower: Coastguards yield to slumber's power. Forward, let us flee."

Or this, with which the reader must be content:

"Hark! the booming at our back!
Slavery's bloodhound's on our track;
Up, and scare them, Union Jack!
Badge of victory."

This personification of the Union Jack is very fine, and in the highest order of imaginative poetry.

The two poems with which we shall conclude our notice of this unique volume, must be given in their entirety. No analysis, however dexterous-no criticism, however acute, could do them justice. The first is principally remarkable for the astonishing effect which so simple an artifice as mere alliteration can produce. "Apt alliteration's artful aid" was never more effectively used:—

66 THE INDIAN VOYAGER. "I've wander'd in distant regions, The homes of the fair and freeOf wealth and poverty;

I've counted the hostile legions,

Prince, pauper and priest,

Groans, galleys, and glee:
Oh! let me feast with the savage beast,
In the wilds of my native sea.

"I've traversed the fields of the stranger,
By river, road and rail;
Alas! e'en those who quail
But little imagine the danger-
Train, tunnel, and track,

Bounce, boiler, and break.

Oh! bear me back to my mountain hack
And my boat on the glassy lake.

"I've dwelt in the city of wonders,

The haunt of the worldly-wise;
Their sullen, clouded skies
No sunshine of heaven e'er sunders:
Fog, funnel, and fume,

Cold, catarrh, and cramp.
Oh! let me roam to my tropic home,
Illumin'd by nature's lamp.

"I've loiter'd in grove and in garret,
Long sacred to lyre and lute;
But now, unpaid, all mute

Hangs the harp of a Byron or Barrett (!)
Hate, hunger, and hire!

Drudge, drivel, and drone!
Oh! let me fire my rustic lyre

In the flash of the torrid zone!

"I've worship'd in church and in chapel,

The type of each Christian scheme; Here Bigotry raves supreme: There Discord has thrown her apple !Cowl, cloister, and cant;

Glebe, gospel and gall:

Oh! let me chant in the desert haunt
A hymn to the Lord of all!

"I've tarried with Dives, the miser,

And smiled in his daughter's train !—
Who would her hand obtain

For her wealth, not her worth, must prize her!

Pelf, pander, and pride:

Sin, sorrow, and shock: (!)
Oh! let me glide to my homely bride-
The bride of my native rock.

"I've stood in the peasant's cottage:
The heart-drop hung in his eye-
His children heaved a sigh
For a mess of poor-house pottage :-
Tithe, treason, and test:

Guilt, gallows, and gore:
Oh! let me rest my harrowed breast
On the far Atlantic shore!"

Notwithstanding the strong desire for repose expressed by our Transatlantic bard in the last two lines, we cannot, in justice to him and ourselves, allow him to rest for a little while longer. In those days of "Papal Aggression," and collegiate inquiry, when in the twinkling of an eye our Protestant University may become a "College

of Cardinals," or revert to its ancient monastic condition, it is just as well that we should have a clear idea of at least one of the possible religious orders that may take up their pleasant abode in College-green. Here, without note or comment, is our author's account of 66 THE MONKS OF LATRAPPE. "The Monks, the Monks of Latrappe!

Penitent, patient, discreet,

Yonder they come in their winding sheet
Fresh from the midnight nap.

Loud tolls the lone nocturnal bell,
Quick runs the Warder's rap:

And straight from each cell

They move along, as by magic spell,
The matutine Monks of Latrappe!

"The Monks, the Monks of Latrappe,
Marshall'd in double file,

Stand waiting adown the sacred aisle,
To catch the chorister's slap:
Hark, how the heart-bolt, shot upright,
Breaks forth in a thunder-clap:

And a column of light

Ascends to the throne of the Lord of