Come kindred mourner, in my breast,
Soothe these discordant tones to rest,
And breathe the soul of peace,
Mild visitor, I feel thee here,
It is not pain that brings this tear,
For thou hast bid it cease.

Oh! many a year has pass'd away,
Since I beneath thy fairy ray,

Attun'd my infant reed;
When wilt thou, Time, those days restore,
Those happy moments now no more,

***

When on the lake's damp marge I lay,
And mark'd the northern meteor's dance;
Bland Hope and Fancy ye were there,
To inspirate my trance.

Twin sisters faintly now ye deign,
Your magic sweets on me to shed,
In vain your powers are now essay'd,
To chace superior pain.

And art thou fled, thou welcome orb,
So swiftly pleasure flies;
So to mankind in darkness lost,

The beam of ardour dies.

Wan Moon thy nightly task is done,
And now encurtained in the main,

Thou sinkest into rest:
But I, in vain, on thorny bed,
Shall woo the god of soft repose-"

"SOLITUDE.

It is not that my lot is low,

That bids this silent tear to flow;
It is not grief that bids me moan,
It is that I am all alone.

In woods and glens I love to roam,
When the tir'd hedger hies him home;
Or by the woodland pool to rest,
When pale the star looks on its breast.
Yet when the silent evening sighs,
With hallow'd airs and symphonies,
My spirit takes another tone,
And sighs that it is all alone.

The autumn leaf is sear and dead,
It floats upon the water's bed;
I would not be a leaf, to die
Without recording sorrows sigh!
The woods and winds, with sullen wail,
Tell all the same unvaried tale;
I've none to smile when I am free,
And when i sigh, to sigh with me.
Yet in my dreams a form I view,
That thinks on me and loves me too;
I start, and when the vision's flown,
I weep that I am all alone."

One canto appears of a poem entitled "the Christiad," which its author seemingly intended for his great work; it opens well, but the subject is certainly not a good one. Two stanzas, written long after the rest, have been rendered eminently pathetic, by the fate of the author.

I.

"Thus far have I pursued my solemn theme

With self-rewarding toil;-thus far have sung

Of godlike deeds, far loftier than be

seem

The lyre, which I in early days have strung;

And now my spirits faint, and I have hung

The shell, that solaced me in saddest hour,

On the dark cypress! and the strings which rung

With Jesus' praise, their harpings now are o'er,

Or when the breeze comes by moan and are heard no more.

And must the harp of Judah sleep again,

Shall I no more re-animate the lay! Oh! thou who visitest the sons of men, Thou who dost listen when the hum

It has escaped the editor, that one of the sonnets beginning "Thy judgments, Lord, are just, &c." is a close translation of that celebrated one by Des Barreau-" Tes jugements, grand Dieu! sont pleins d'equité") the expression of which is so striking,' and the sentiments so horrible.

On the whole we cannot conclude our article better, than in the words with which Mr. Southey takes his leave of the youthful poet he has so ably and so feelingly commemorated" These volumes contain

what he has left, immature buds, and blossoms shaken from the tree, and green fruit; yet will they evince what the harvest would have been,

and secure for him that remembrance upon earth for which he toiled."

COWPER's admirable piece, bearing the same title with this, is perhaps too fresh in our memories, and in those of our readers, to allow us to do full justice to another on the same topic. That is a masterpiece; this certainly is not; yet has it some share of merit. We learn from the dedication, what ought also to have appeared in the title-page, that it is a republication. The date of the first edition we do not learn, and therefore cannot pronounce which poem was first in order of time. We have observed nothing in Mr. Cooke's that can fairly be pronounced plagiarism or imitation. Some similarity of sentiment on the same subject could scarcely be avoided.

The sense of this piece is better than the expression, which is frequently feeble or aukward, and sometimes obscure. The rules laid down are such as only the best society could teach. The following is perhaps the best wrought pas

Others again-tho' scrupulous to touch

The slightest secret, compromis'd as such; BOUND BY NO PROMISE, THINK IT LAWFUL PRIZE,

Hence round the town in various shapes it flies,

As suits the comic, or satyric strain,
The loose-malicious-ignorant, or vain.
But is there no restrictive pow'r which
stays

Folly's report ?-or Passion's hasty phrase?

Is there no voluntary pledge of mind
In Conversation's institutes, which bind ?

Oyes!-'tis our's to take the gen'rous side, And feel this mute injunction-'tis implied;

No seal like HONOUR-'tis the stamp of kings,

The sacred fount whence obligation springs,

Virtue's strong guard against corruption's host,

The peer's best voucher-and the poor's best boast;

Without it, words unheeded pass away, Nor oaths bind those accustomed to be. tray."

ANOTHER self-taught poet, who appears to have enjoyed fewer opportunities of mental cultivation than any one who has yet come under our cognizance! The memoir of himself, with which James Hogg has prefaced his volume, exhibits an odd mixture of vanity and simplicity. He lets us know that all the school education he ever received, terminated before he was eight years old; the little he had then learned, he had afterwards no opportunity of keeping up; and in the eighteenth year of his age, could scarcely read at all. About this period, having now risen from the occupation of a cow-herd to that of a shepherd, he had the fortune to meet with friends who supplied him with books.

"IT was, while serving here, in the 18th year of my age, that I first got a perusal of "The Life and Adventures of Sir William Wallace," and "The Gentle Shepherd;" and though immoderately fond of them, yet (what you will think remarkable in one who hath since dabbled so much in verses) I could not help regretting deeply that they were not in prose, that every body might have understood them; or, I thought, if they had been in the same kind of metre with the "Psalms," I could have borne with them. The truth is, I made exceedingly slow progress in reading them: the little reading that I had learned, I had nearly

lost, and the Scottish dialect quite confounded me; so that, before I got to the end of a line, I had commonly lost the rhyme of the preceding one; and if I came to a triplet, a thing of which I the foot of the page without perceiving had no conception, I commonly read to that I had lost the rhyme altogether. Thus, after 1 had got through them both, I found myself much in the same predicament with the man of Eskdalemuir, who borrowed Bailey's Dictionary from his neighbour. On returning it, the lender asked him, what he thought of it?" I don't know," replied he, " I have read it all through, but cannot say that I understand it; it is the most confused book that ever I saw in my life!" The late Mrs. Laidlaw of Willenslee took some notice of me, and frequently gave me books to fead while tending the ewes; these were chiefly theological : the only one that I remember any thing of, is Bishop Burnet's Theory of the Conflagration of the Earth. Happy was it for me that I did not understand it; for the little of it that I did understand, had nearly overturned my brain altogether. All the day I was pondering on the grand millenium, and the reign of the saints; and all the night dreaming of new heavens and a new earth; the stars in horror, and the world in flames! Mrs. Laidlaw also gave me sometimes the newspapers, which I pored on with great earnestness; beginning at the date, and reading straight on, through advertisements of houses and lands, Balm of Gilead, and every thing; and, after all,

was often no wiser than when I began. To give you some farther idea of the progress I had made in literature;-I was about this time obliged to write a letter to my elder brother, and, having never drawn a pen for such a number of years, I had actually forgot how to make sundry of the letters of the alphabet, which I had either to print, or patch up the words in the best way that I could,

without them,

"At Whitsunday 1790, being then in the nineteenth year of my age, I left Willenslee, and hired myself to Mr. Laidlaw of Blackhouse, with whom I served as a shepherd nine years. The kindness of this gentleman to me it would be the utmost ingratitude ever to forget; for indeed it was much more like that of a father than a master; and it is not improbable that I should have been there still, had it not been for the following cir

cumstance.

My brother William had, for some time before that, occupied the farm of Ettrick-house, where he resided with our parents; but having taken a wife, and the place not suiting two families, he took another residence, and gave up the farm to me. The lease expiring at Whitsunday 1793, our possession was taken by a wealthier neighbour. The first time that I attempted to write verses, was in the spring of the year 1793. Mr. Laidlaw having a number of valuable books, which were all open to my perusal, 1, about this time, began to read with considerable attention, and, no sooner did I begin to read so as to understand, than, rather prematurely, I began to write. The first thing that ever I attempted, was a poetical epistle to a student of divinity, an acquaintance of mine. It was a piece of most fulsome flattery, and was mostly composed of borrowed lines and sentences from Dryden's Virgil, and Harvey's Life of Bruce. I scarcely remember one line

of it.

"But the first thing that ever I composed that was really my own, was a rhyme, entitled, An Address to the Duke of Buccleuch, in beha'f o' mysel', an' ither poor fo'k.

In the same year, after a deal of pains, I finished a song, called, The Way that the World goes on; and Wattie and Geordie Foreign Intelligence, an eclogue:

These were my first years productions; and having continued to write on ever since, often without either rhyme or reason, my pieces have multiplied exceedingly."

He afterwards gives a particular account of his manner of composing verse, and apparently has the folly to think it matter of boasting that he can scarcely ever be prevailed on to change a single word! His early attempts do not appear to have met with much success, even among persons in his own rank of life: But the publication of " the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," and probably the patronage of its editor, at length afforded him the means of making his appearance in one of Ballantyne's handsome octavos, published by subscription.

It has been found by experience, that few classes of writers have, generally speaking, less claim to the praise of originality than those called self-taught poets. They are frequently the most servile imitators of the few, and often bad models, to which they may have gained access. It was probably, therefore, the best thing that James Hogg could do, as a writer, to select a few of the traditional tales of his native district, about which the public curiosity had just then been in a style resembling that of the excited, and attempt to relate them

ancient ballad. His endeavours

have not proved altogether unsuccessful: these imitations, though not sufficiently exact to deceive a connoisseur, have yet a very considerable likeness to their originals. The stories are not in general very good ones. "The Pedlar" is a vulgar tale of a priest's laying the afterwards detected by a bone of ghost of a pedlar, whose murderer is the deceased bleeding at his touch. A note upon this ballad furnishes the disgraceful fact, that it is only thirty years since an occupant of the mill of Thirlestane, where