Be contented in thy prison,
Thy captivity shall cease-
Taste the good that smiles before thee;
Restless spirit, be at peace!

"With the roar of wintry forests,

With the thunder's crash and roll,
With the rush of stormy waters,
Thou wouldst sympathise, O soul!
Thou wouldst ask them mighty questions
In a language of their own,
Untranslateable to mortals,
Yet not utterly unknown.

'Thou wouldst fathom Life and Being,
Thou wouldst see through Birth and Death,
Thou wouldst solve the eternal riddle-
Thou, a speck, a ray, a breath

Thou wouldst look at stars and systems,
As if thou couldst understand
All the harmonies of Nature,
Struck by an Almighty hand.

"With thy feeble logic, tracing
Upwards from effect to cause,
Thou art foiled by Nature's barriers,
And the limits of her laws.

Be at peace, thou struggling spirit!
Great Eternity denies

The unfolding of its secrets

In the circle of thine eyes.

"Be contented with thy freedom-
Dawning is not perfect day;

There are truths thou canst not fathom,
Swaddled in thy robes of clay.
Rest in hope that if thy circle
Grow not wider here in Time,
God's Eternity shall give thee
Power of vision more sublime.

"Clogged and bedded in the darkness,
Little germ, abide thine hour,
Thou'lt expand, in proper season,
Into blossom, into flower.
Humble faith alone becomes thee
In the glooms where thou art lain :
Bright is the appointed future;
Wait-thou shalt not wait in vain.

"Cease thy struggling, feeble spirit!
Fret not at thy prison bars;
Never shall thy mortal pinions
Make the circuit of the stars.
Here on Earth are duties for thee,
Suited to thine earthly scope;
Seek them, thou Immortal Spirit-
God is with thee-work in hope."

Charles Mackay is not so delicate a poet as Longfellow, nor perhaps so profound; but what he says is said off-hand, and comes fresh from a good heart. Where the other loiters gracefully over the expression of a senti ment, Mackay has it expressed, and is

gone on to the expression of a new one, without giving you time to consider whether the emotions you experience have been excited by graceful or ungraceful diction. The emotions are sprightly, animating, and humane; and, like good wine drunk in the twilight, give you enough of enjoyment without having regard to the fashion of the vehicle. Every now and then, indeed, you are charmed with a simplicity, a grace, and kindliness not unworthy of Beranger. Like Beranger, he is most happy in his least ambitious moments. Uttering the genial sentiments of the honest fellow of every-day life, he is as good as can be; communicating the emotions excited in a poetic temperament by the lovely and beautiful, he is very good; straining at the grand aspirations of the philosophical poet, he is good only sub modo, and fails to get into the upper region, where great spirits alone can expatiate with dignity and freedom. It is a shallow but a clear stream of song; a beneficent visitant of the meadows and pastures; delightful company for the wayfarer; making merry with the mill-wheel, and prattling sweetly to the loiterers on the rustic bridge; but it is not calculated to float navies, or even to bear any very heavily-laden barge of philosophy. Let us, however, in his own spirit of enjoyment, make the most of it. Here he has given us a new volume of poems heartily welcome, See how he turns even the forbidding topic of "Procrastination" to good and pleasurable account: Beranger, indeed, could hardly have done it better:—

III.

"If those to whom we owe a debt
Are harmed unless we pay,
When shall we struggle to be just?
To-day, my love, to-day.

But if our debtor fail our hope,
And plead his ruin thorough,

When shall we weigh his breach of faith?
To-morrow, love, to-morrow.

IV.

"If Love estranged should once again Her genial smile display,

When shall we kiss her proffered lips?
To-day, my love, to-day.

But if she would indulge regret,
Or dwell with bygone sorrow,
When shall we weep, if weep we must?
To-morrow, love, to-morrow.

V.

"For virtuous acts and harmless joys
The minutes will not stay;
We've always time to welcome them,
To-day, my love, to-day.

But care, resentment, angry words,
And unavailing sorrow,
Come far too soon, if they appear

To-morrow, love, to-morrow."

The same genial spirit appears in the "Plea for our Physical Life." Delays are not always dangerous; and there are sensuous, if not sensual, enjoyments which the wisely-spiritual man will not disparage :

"A PLEA FOR OUR PHYSICAL LIFE.

"We do our nature wrong
Neglecting over long

The bodily joys that help to make us wise;
The ramble up the slope

Cf the high mountain cope

The long day's walk, the vigorous exercise,
The fresh, luxurious bath,
Far from the trodden path,

Or 'mid the ocean waves dashing with harmless roar,

Lifting us off our feet upon the sandy shore.

"Kind heaven! there is no end
Of pleasures as we wend

Our pilgrimage in life's undevious way,
If we but know the laws
Of the Eternal Cause,

And for His glory and our good obey.
But intellectual pride
Sets half these joys aside,

And our perennial care absorbs the soul so much,

That life burns cold and dim beneath its deadening touch.

"Welcome, ye plump green meads, Ye streams and sighing reeds! Welcome, ye corn-fields, waving like a sea!

Lyrics such as these leave good effects on the age in which they are written. The masses of England stood much in need of some such cheerful monitor. It is not surprising that these poems, fulfilling so well the conditions of cheerfulness, generosity, and independence, should have become very eminent popular favourites; may they long continue so. A people among whom Charles Mackay is a popular writer, must possess largely the elements of greatness and the reality of goodness. Their visions of democratic perfection may be somewhat exalted and cloudy, but their practice in the daily walks of life can hardly be other than kind, honest, and independent.

What next? "Whose Poems?"* A quaint title; but on looking beyond

the title-page we think it no matter who's.

"Aurora and other Poems,"† by Mrs. H. R. Sandbach. Mrs. Sandbach has attempted the poetic treatment of the locomotive. Coke is a difficult subject to all but stokers and pokers. We cannot say that Mrs. Sandbach kindles any poetical impulse with the ashes of Shelley :

"There issued forth

A shape with flaming wings, And glowing eyes, and streaming hair, And voice that sharply rings. I am the daughter

Of fire and water," &c., &c.

A beautiful statue of Aurora by Gibson furnishes a happier vein of inspiration. The artist has realised in marble a sentiment happily, if not very originally, cast into words by the writer:

"Calm, holy, steadfast, clear, and yet more clear,

The pearly light around her sweetly lies; And the grave heavens their virgin child re

vere,

And silent welcome smiles along the skies."

This sweet figure excites a strain of humane and amiable versification. If it had somewhat more of purpose and concentration, we would venture to designate it poetry. But "Aurora" looks on so many objects, and with an eye so little respectful of persons, that the answer cannot well be expected to be otherwise than multifarious and disjointed, to such a question as Mrs. Sandbach, with the echo of Shelley's "Cloud" still haunting her ear, proposes:

"What hast thou seen, oh, Maiden, Upon this dim world, laden

With care, and joy, and pain? From out its troubled surges, Its songs, and chants, and dirges,

What, Maiden, dost thou gain ?"

"Song, and chants, and dirges" are not for the twilight preceding the break of day, but are here, we suppose, mainly because the world's "surges" are there before them. But there are some spectacles proper to the hour,

And to his eye approaching. At his feet, See, eager for the chase, with muscle strained Against the arm that curbs him, the keen hound

In sight of prey, arrested as he springs.

"The man superior, stooping to control him, And with raised brow, and eye perceiving, pauses

An instant on the issue. Thus he stands;
Repose and action centered in one point
Of time, eventful. And the Sculptor's genius,
Proved in the appreciation of the moment,
As in its true embodiment, confessed,
Unchallenged, in his great work lives for
ever."

But ever so many such graceful trifles don't make a good volume of poems; and we must see whether the muse do not reserve something better for us.

Apollo's lyre, done in blue and gold, and a grim Daguerreotype of the hardfeatured old poet himself, introduce us to "The Poetical Works of John Struthers, with Autobiography." "My mouth shall speak of wisdom, and the meditation of my heart shall be of understanding," is Mr. Struthers' motto. To speak of wisdom is easy enough, but to speak wisdom itself is another matter, in which Mr. Struthers is but very partially successful. Mr. Struthers is the author of the original poem of the " Poor Man's Sabbath;" that is, his "Poor Man's Sabbath" was published shortly before Graham's "Sabbath," to which it has a natural, though unintentional resemblance. In fact it would be very difficult for a Scottish Presbyterian poet to write in that strain, in any way much differing from the model "Cotter's Saturday Night" of Burns. The same routine of topics, and the same system of be lief, necessarily induce the same sort of descriptions, reflections, and applications. The poor man returning from worship, relates the heads of the sermon to his family-perhaps a discourse on this text-perhaps on that. He himself reads to them the Scriptures-perhaps this passage, perhaps that ad libitum. We always thought that portion of the "Cotter's Saturday Night" overdone, where Burns enumerates the various parts of the Scripture which the cotter may be supposed to read to the family group. Mr. Struthers

Psalms, where poetry may, without the same impropriety, be admitted to come in aid of religion, he appears quite unconscious of the excellence of the great hands who have already dealt with that subject; and with the most noble and perfect of all versions of the first Psalm of David habitually in his

ears

"That man hath perfect righteousness,
Who walketh not astray,
In council of ungodly men,

Nor stands in sinners' way;
Nor sitteth in the scorner's chair,

But placeth his delight
Upon God's law, and meditates,
Therein both day and night;

"He shall be like a goodly tree,

Fast planted by a river,
Which in its season yields its fruit,
And its leaf fadeth never;
And all he doth shall prosper well,

The wicked are not so,
But like are they unto the chaff,

The wind drives to and fro "

He complacently lilts up his own—

"Perfectly that man is blessed,

Who, bewildered, never strays;
With ungodly workers classed,

Learning dark their guilty ways."

Being bewildered, the man in question must needs stray somewhere or other. Whether we read "blassed" and "classed," or "blessed" and "clessed," the introduction of a system of classification of workers savours more of the factory than of the first Psalm. Mr. Struthers' other improvements on the text in the subsequent stanzas are equally out of place. "Him," speaking of the bewildered unclassified man—

"Him prosperity shall nourish

Under Heaven's refreshing dew; Thus delightful shall he flourish, Ever waxing on the view. While the wicked shall as stubble,

In affliction's dry wind waste, Chaff-like chased on hills of trouble, By destruction's burning blast."

Mr. Struthers, however, considers that his character as a poet calls for some particular account of his career as a man, and gives us a very minute and entertaining autobiography. To our mind, there is more poetry in the prose narration than in the poems. Take our author's first start in life as