CXIV. "THE WORLD IS BRIGHT BEFORE THEE."

HALLECK.

[FITZGREENE HALLECK was born in Guilford, Connecticut, in August, 1795. He first became known as a poet by his share in a series of graceful and humorous pieces which appeared in the New York Evening Post, under the signature of "Croaker & Co.," and were the joint productions of himself and his friend Joseph Rodman Drake. In 1819 appeared Fanny, a light and airy sketch of city life and manners, without the author's name, but universally ascribed to Mr. Halleck, and at length acknowledged by him. In 1827, after a visit to Europe, he published a small volume, called Alnwick Castle and other Poems, portions of which had appeared before in a fugitive form. In this volume are found his spirited and stirring stanzas on Marco Bozzaris, which have been so universally read and admired. Mr. Halleck has written very little, but that little is of great excellence. His poetry is polished and graceful, and finished with great care, under the guidance of a most fastidious taste. A vein of sweet and delicate sentiment runs through all his serious productions, and he combines with this a power of humor of the most refined and exquisite cast. He has the art of passing from grave to gay, or the reverse, by the most skilful and happily-managed transitions.]

THE world is bright before thee;
It's summer flowers are thine;
Its calm, blue sky is o'er thee,
Thy bosom pleasure's shrine;
And thine the sunbeam given
To nature's morning hour,
Pure, warm, as when from heaven
It burst on Eden's bower.

There is a song of sorrow,

The death dirge of the gay,
That tells, ere dawn of morrow,
These charms may melt away-
That sun's bright beam be shaded,
That sky be blue no more,
The summer flowers be faded,
And youth's warm promise o'er.

Believe it not; though lonely
Thy evening home may be ;
Though beauty's bark can only

Float on a summer sea,

[JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE was born in the city of New York, August 7, 1795, and died in September, 1820. He wrote The Culprit Fay, a poem in which the characters and incidents of fairy mythology are transferred to our own soil. It shows a playful and creative fancy, and a fine ear for the music of verse. Dr. Drake (he was a physician by profession) also wrote some smaller pieces; among them, some spirited and well-known stanzas to the American flag. The following extract is from the opening of The Culprit Fay.]

"TIS the middle watch of a summer's night-
The earth is dark, but the heavens are bright;
Nought is seen in the vault on high

But the moon, and the stars, and the cloudless sky,
And the flood which rolls its milky hue,

A river of light, on the welkin blue.

The moon looks down on old Cro'nest;

She mellows the shades on his shaggy breast,
And seems his huge gray form to throw,
In a silver cone, on the wave below.
His sides are broken by spots of shade,
By the walnut bough and the cedar made,
And through their clustering branches dark
Glimmers and dies the firefly's spark

Like starry twinkles that momently break
Through the rifts of the gathering tempest's rack

The stars are on the moving stream,
And fling, as its ripples gently flow,

A hill on the North River.

A burnished length of wavy beam,

In an eel-like, spiral line below;
The winds are whist, and the owl is still,
The bat in the shelvy rock is hid,

And nought is heard on the lonely hill

But the cricket's chirp, and the answer shrill Of the gauze-winged katydid,

And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will, Who mourns unseen, and ceaseless sings Ever a note of wail and woe,

Till morning spreads her rosy wings, And earth and sky in her glances glow.

"Tis the hour of fairy ban and spell:
The wood-tick has kept the minutes well;
He has counted them all with click and stroke,
Deep in the heart of the mountain oak,
And he has awakened the sentry elve
Who sleeps with him in the haunted tree,
To bid him ring the hour of twelve,

And call the fays to their revelry; Twelve small strokes on his tinkling bell('Twas made of the white snail's pearly shell,)66 Midnight comes, and all is well!

Hither, hither, wing your way!

"Tis the dawn of the fairy day."

They come from beds of lichen green,

They creep from the mullein's velvet screen;

Some on the backs of beetles fly

From the silver tops of moon-touched trees,

Where they swung in their cobweb hammocks high, And rocked about in the evening breeze;

Some from the humbird's downy nest

They had driven him out by elfin power,

And pillowed on plumes of his rainbow breast,

Had slumbered there till the charmed hour;
Some had lain in the scoop of the rock,
With glittering ising-stars inlaid;

And some had opened the four o'clock,
And stole within its purple shade.

And now they throng the moonlight glade,

[This beautiful and picturesque passage is from a review of Gleig's Life of Warren Hastings, which appeared in the Edinburgh Review for October, 1841, and is ole of Macaulay's most brilliant and elaborate papers. His remarks on the rare combination of qualities in Burke's mind are as true as they are fine. Macaulay himself lived four years in India, and thus was enabled to color his picture with hues drawn from his own memory. The young reader will notice what rhetorical effect is gained by the enumer. ation of particulars in speaking of Burke's knowledge of India. This is a great art in rhetoric. The strongest statement, in general terms, that Burke thoroughly understood India, would be nothing, in point of energy, to the accumulated and multiplied impression made by all these little details coming one after the other.]

His knowledge of India was such as few, even of those Europeans who have passed many years in that country, have attained, and such as certainly was never attained by any public man who had not quitted Europe. He had studied the history, the laws, and the usages of the East, with an industry such as is seldom found united with so much genius and so much sensibility. Others have perhaps been equally laborious, and have collected an equal mass of materials. But the manner in which Burke brought his higher powers of intellect to work on statements of facts and on tables of figures, was peculiar to himself. In every part of those huge bales of Indian

✦ This expression must mean the bits of mica found in the crevices of rocks.

information, which repelled almost all other readers, his mind, at once poetical and philosophical, found something to instruct or delight. His reason analyzed and digested those vast and shapeless masses; his imagination animated and colored them. Out of darkness, and dulness, and confusion, he formed a multitude of ingenious theories and vivid pictures.

He had, in the highest degree, that noble faculty whereby man is able to live in the past and in the future, in the distant and in the unreal. India and its habitants were not to him, as to most Englishmen, mere names and abstractions, but a real country and a real people. The burning sun, the strange vegetation of the palm and cocoa tree, the rice field, the tank, the huge trees, older than the Mogul empire, under which the village crowds assemble, the thatched roof of the peasant's hut, the rich tracery of the mosque where the imaun prays with his face to Mecca, the drums, and banners, and gaudy idols, the devotee swinging in the air, the graceful maiden, with the pitcher on her head, descending the steps to the river's side, the black faces, the long beards, the yellow streaks of sect, the turbans and the flowing robes, the spears and the silver maces, the elephants with their canopies of state, the gorgeous palanquin of the prince, and the close litter of the noble lady,—all these were to him as the objects amidst which his own life had been passed, as the objects which lay on the road between Beaconsfield and St. James's Street. All India was present to the eye of his mind, from the halls where suitors laid gold and perfumes at the feet of sovereigns to the wild moor where the gypsy camp was pitched, from the bazaar, humming like a beehive with the crowd of buyers and sellers, to the jungle where the lonely courier shakes his bunch of iron rings to scare away the hyenas. He had just as lively an idea of the insurrection at Benares as of Lord George Gordon's riots, and of the execution of Nuncomar as of the execution of Dr. Dodd. Oppres sion in Bengal was to him the same thing as oppression in the streets of London.

The name of Burke's estate.