Though sometimes aimless thoughts and woes Her looks like summer lightning spread, The calm without the trance of sleep. And so she freshened all his life, We lack space to designate the many beautiful touches which give effect to this simple rhythmical tale. Sterling has thrown around it the charm of a pensive imagination, unexaggerated and natural. He sincerely recognised the principle of his favourite Carlyle, that "Reverence is the condition of insight." His ideal of love is elevated-uniting the human and religious: And man will ask below the skies That breast may lean to beating breast, Yet could he temper love and meekness "Aphrodite" exhales a classical spirit and has many fine images. As a poem it offers a rich contrast to the "Sexton's Daughter"-and is radiant with the atmosphere of the goddess, by whom As tale and history tell, By whom all things are beautiful, And joy from every throe is born, The "Hymns of a Hermit" are pervaded by a truly devout spirit, a confidence in truth, and a sublime hope. The language is concise and appropriate, and some memorable lines occur. "Otho III.," "Louis XV.," and "Alfred the Harper," are highly suggestive historical anecdotes, reproduced in eloquent and picturesque verse. But perhaps the most striking and characteristic of Sterling's minor poems, is that entitled "Abelard to Heloise." though ostensibly the embodiment of another's feeling, it has an earnest clearness-a deep undertone and terse beauty which mark it as the offspring of individual emotion. It is a genuine sibylline leaf torn warm from the heart of an impassioned, yet noble and just being, which appeals to the fondest records of experience. Al Such life-dramas, as that of Sterling, have an immortal type in Hamlet. We recognise in the souls whose developments we thus trace-as in the character of the musing prince-reflective powers, both acute and profound, a world of sensibility, impassioned affections, delicate moral feeling-all the noblest elements of humanity, yet so balanced and opposed as to find no healthful and complete external manifestation. Hence the internal conflict, the aspirations and doubts, the magnificent conceptions and ardent longings which find vague utterance perhaps, but "lose the name of action." An existence like this, is more common to this than any preceding age; and its record is, as before suggested, like a problem but half solved. In a word, the restlessness which accompanies the unattained, robs it of perfect harmony. The want of a nucleus only seems to prevent a splendid crystallization. Struggle is the most obvious law, and regret the most evident fruit of powers which needed but definite scope, aim, and motive to leave enduring and valuable fruits. With variety of knowledge, there are no grand and satisfactory principles; with intense thought there comes forth no sustaining belief; with quick and ardent affection, there is no lasting, adequate and reciprocated love. Social claims and personal individuality, taste and necessity, duty and love, by perpetual conflict, restrain the efficiency of the man. He is a looker-on, where he would fain be an actor; he dreams, hopes and reasons in a perpetual circle; reveals himself by glimpses, and, haunted by a sense of lofty purposes,—with a mind craving new and vast truth, and a heart parched with an infinite thirst for sympathy instead of adventure, pilgrimage, warfare, or original intellectual creation those moulds in which the glowing spirits of past ages cast the lava of enthusiasm-a morbid self-inspection, a melancholy prying into consciousness—an oppressive sense of the responsibility and the mysteries of life, make the gifted of this century too often but modified reproductions of Childe Harold — which, notwithstanding the repudiation of critics, is most emphatically the illustrative epic of the age. Sterling was, indeed, guiltless of ungrateful misanthropy; and his pious sentiments were a bar to reckless despair; but when we trace the evidences in these volumes of intense mental activity, a fearless spirit of inquiry, a singularly candid and affectionate disposition, and the comparatively meagre result-we cannot but feel that this self-dissatisfaction was inevitable. Want of scope is, indeed, the complaint of the most gifted of the present day. They leave memorials of what they were capable of, instead of eternal deeds and writings. Achievement seems to have become visionary, conquest a speculative event, and martyrdom a domestic process. Shelley in his Letters from an Italian hermitage, and Lamartine in his Palestine Journal, breathe the same consciousness of baffled will and perplexed endeavour. Indeed, how few men, like Schiller, unite genius and character, power regulated by wisdom, and writings moulded from the soul's life, yet shaped into forms of enduring beauty, by patience, taste and rectitude! The Rhetorician. BURKE. To the cotemporaries of a great statesman it is of vital moment to decide whether his opinions agree with each other and if his course is loyal. But to the reader of a future day, his writings are chiefly attractive for the truth they contain and the resources of thought and style they exhibit. No public character escapes animadversion, for if there is nothing in actions which party hatred can execrate, there is always room enough for base surmise in regard to motives. Happily the graces of composition, the pleadings of humanity, the serene effulgence of wisdom, survive such transient and local warfare. True eloquence, like poetry, is hallowed by enduring admiration; and as we attach an inestimable value to a portrait by Titian, although the very name of the original has perished, so the warm and exquisite hues of noble fancy and the effective light and shade of ardent thought, continue sacred long after the questions upon which they were expended have been forgotten, and the temporary ends they subserved have ceased to obtain. Depth and clearness of reflection and beauty of style |