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From hard control and tyrant rules,
The unfeeling discipline of schools,
In thought he loves to roam,

And tears will struggle in his eye,
While he remembers with a sigh
The comforts of his home.

Youth comes; the toils and cares of life
Torment the restless mind;

Where shall the tired and harass'd heart
Its consolation find?

Then is not Youth, as Fancy tells,
Life's summer prime of joy?
Ah no! for hopes too long delay'd,
And feelings blasted or betray'd,
Its fabled bliss destroy;

And Youth remembers with a sigh
The careless days of Infancy.

Maturer Manhood now arrives,

And other thoughts come on;
But with the baseless hopes of Youth
Its generous warmth is gone:
Cold, calculating cares succeed,
The timid thought, the wary deed,
The dull realities of truth;
Back on the past he turns his eye,
Remembering, with an envious sigh,
The happy dreams of Youth.
So reaches he the latter stage
Of this our mortal pilgrimage,
With feeble step and slow;
New ills that latter stage await,
And old Experience learns too late
That all is vanity below.

Life's vain delusions are gone by:

Its idle hopes are o'er;

Yet Age remembers with a sigh

The days that are no more.

THE TRUE MISSION OF ENGLAND.

Train up thy children, England! in the ways
Of righteousness, and feed them with the bread
Of wholesome doctrine. Where hast thou thy mines
But in their industry?

Thy bulwarks where, but in their breasts?
Thy might, but in their arms?

Shall not their numbers therefore be thy wealth,
Thy strength, thy power, thy safety, and thy pride?
O grief then, grief and shame,

If, in this flourishing land,

There should be dwellings where the new-born babe Doth bring unto its parents' soul no joy!

Where squalid Poverty
Receives it at its birth,

And on her wither'd knees

Gives it the scanty food of discontent!
Queen of the Seas! enlarge thyself;
Redundant as thou art of life and power,
Be thou the hive of nations,
And send thy swarms abroad!
Send them, like Greece of old,
With arts and science to enrich
The uncultivated earth;

But with more precious gifts than Greece, or Tyre,
Or elder Egypt to the world bequeath'd-
Just laws and rightful polity,

And, crowning all, the dearest boon of Heaven,
Its word and will reveal'd.

Queen of the Seas! enlarge

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Train up thy children, England, in the ways

Of righteousness, and feed them with the bread
Of wholesome doctrine. Send thy swarms abroad!
Send forth thy humanizing arts,

Thy stirring enterprise,

Thy liberal polity, thy gospel light!
Illume the dark idolater,

Reclaim the savage! O thou Ocean Queen!
Be these thy toils when thou hast laid
The thunderbolt aside:

He who hath bless'd thine arms

Will bless thee in these holy works of Peace!
Father! thy kingdom come, and as in heaven

Thy will be done on earth.

As a prose writer, no author of the nineteenth century has written upon so many and various subjects; and all his writings are marked by an easy flowing style, extensive reading, and a vein of poetical feeling that runs through the whole, whether critical, historical, or political. Besides his numerous contributions to the "Quarterly Review," mentioned in the note on page 406, he has published the following:

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'History of Brazil," three volumes; "History of the Peninsular War," two volumes; "Book of the Church;" "Life of Lord Nelson;" "Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella," three volumes, a series of observations on English manners and the prospects of England; "Letters from Spain and Portugal," two volumes; "Omniana," a collection of critical remarks and curious quotations; "The Doctor," five volumes,—“a work partly fictitious, but abounding in admirable description and quaint fanciful delineation of character;" "Pro

gress and Prospects of Society," two volumes; "Essays, Moral and Political," two volumes; "Lives of Uneducated Poets;" "Life of Cowper," and an edition of his works, in fifteen volumes. These, and other minor prose works, are proofs alike of his wonderful, untiring industry, and of the easy and admirable English style, of which he was so consummate a master.1

FIELD PREACHING-WESLEY.

"I wonder at those," says Wesley, "who talk of the indecency of field preaching. The highest indecency is in St. Paul's Church, where a considerable part of the congregation are asleep, or talking, or looking about, not minding a word the preacher says. On the other hand, there is the highest decency in a church-yard or field, where the whole congregation behave and look as if they saw the Judge of all, and heard Him speaking from heaven." Sometimes, when he had finished the discourse and pronounced the blessing, not a person offered to move: the charm was upon them still; and every man, woman, and child remained where they were, till he set the example of leaving the ground. One day many of his hearers were seated upon a long wall, built, as is common in the northern counties, of loose stones. In the middle of the sermon it fell with them. "I never saw, heard, nor read of such a thing before," he says. "The whole wall, and the persons sitting upon it, sunk down together, none of them screaming out, and very few altering their posture, and not one was hurt at all; but they appeared sitting at the bottom, just as they sat at the top. Nor was there any interruption either of my speaking or of the attention of the hearers."

The situations in which he preached sometimes contributed to the impression, and he himself perceived, that natural influences operated upon the multitude, like the pomp and circumstance of Romish

The following very beautiful letter is in answer to a letter from Cottle expressing his regret that, on retiring from the bookselling business, he had not returned to Southey the copyrights of his early works. It is hard to say to which of the parties such a letter is most creditable:

"MY DEAR COTTLE:-What you say of my copyrights affects me very much. Dear Cottle, set your heart at rest on that subject. It ought to be at rest. They were yours: fairly bought and fairly sold. You bought them on the chance of their success, which no Lon ion bookseller would have done; and had they not been bought, they could not have been published at all. Nay, if you had not published Joan of Arc,' the poem would never have existed, nor should I, in all probability, ever have obtained that reputation which is the capital on which I subsist, nor that power which enables me to support it.

"But this is not all. Do you suppose, Cottle, that I have forgotten those true and mosĖ essential acts of friendship which you showed me when I stood most in need of them? Your house was my house when I had no other. The very money with which I bought my wedding-ring, and paid my marriage fees, was supplied by you. It was with your sisters that I left my Edith during my six months' absence; and, for the six months after my return, it was from you that I received, week by week, the little on which we lived, till I was enabled to live by other means. It is not the settling of our cash account that can cancel obligations like these. You are in the habit of preserving your letters,-and if you are not, I would entreat you to preserve this, that it might be seen hereafter. Sure I am. that there never was a more generous nor a kinder heart than yours; and you will believe me when I add that there does not live that man upon earth whom I remember with more gratitude and more affection. My heart throbs, and my eyes burn with these recollections. Good night, my dear old friend and benefactor. ROBERT SOUTHEY.”

worship. Sometimes, in a hot and cloudless summer day, he and his congregation were under cover of the sycamores, which afford so deep a shade to some of the old farm-houses in Westmoreland and Cumberland. In such a scene, near Brough, he observes, that a bird perched on one of the trees, and sung without intermission from the beginning of the service till the end. No instrumental concert would have accorded with the place and feeling of the hour so well. Sometimes, when his discourse was not concluded till twilight, he saw that the calmness of the evening agreed with the seriousness of the people, and that "they seemed to drink in the word of God as a thirsty land the refreshing showers." One of his preaching-places in Cornwall was in what had once been the court-yard of a rich and honorable man. But he and all his family were in the dust, and his memory had almost perished. "At Gwenap, in the same county," he says, "I stood on the wall, in the calm, still evening, with the setting sun behind me, an almost innumerable multitude before, behind, and on either hand. Many likewise sat on the little hills, at some distance from the bulk of the congregation. But they could all hear distinctly while I read, 'The disciple is not above his Master,' and the rest of those comfortable words which are day by day fulfilled in our ears." This amphitheatre was one of his favorite stations. He says of it, in his old age, "I think this is one of the most magnificent spectacles which is to be seen on this side heaven. And no music is to be heard upon earth comparable to the sound of many thousand voices, when they are all harmoniously joined together, singing praises to God and the Lamb." At St. Ives, when a high wind prevented him standing where he had intended, he found a little enclosure near, one end of which was native rock, rising ten or twelve feet perpendicular, from which the ground fell with an easy descent. "A jutting out of the rock, about four feet from the ground, gave me a very convenient pulpit. Here well-nigh the whole town, high and low, rich and poor, assembled together. Nor was there a word to be heard, nor a smile seen, from one end of the congregation to the other. It was just the same the three following evenings. Indeed, I was afraid, on Saturday, that the roaring of the sea, raised by the north wind, would have prevented their hearing. But God gave me so clear and strong a voice, that I believe scarce one word was lost." On the next day the storm had ceased, and the clear sky, the setting sun, and the smooth still ocean, all agreed with the state of the audience.

Life of Wesley.

COWPER'S TASK.

Cowper's Task appeared in the interval when young minds were prepared to receive it, and at a juncture when there was no poet of

any great ability or distinguished name in the field. Gray and Akenside were dead. Mason was silent. Glover, brooding over his "Athenaid," was regarded as belonging to an age that was past. Churchill was forgotten. Emily and Bampfylde had been cut off in the blossom of their youth. Crabbe, having by the publication of his "Library," his "Village," and his "Newspaper," accomplished his heart's immediate desire, sought at that time for no further publicity; and Hayley ambled over the course without a competitor. There never was a season at which such a poem could have appeared with more advantage; and perhaps there never was a poem of which the immediate success, as well as the permanent estimation, might with so much certainty have been predicted. The subject, or rather the occasion, of the poem had been fortuitous; and the key in which it was pitched, as being best suited to the theme, was precisely that which enabled the poet to exhibit the whole compass of his powers.

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The "Task" was at once descriptive, moral, and satirical. The descriptive parts everywhere bore evidence of a thoughtful mind and a gentle spirit, as well as of an observant eye; and the moral sentiment which pervaded them, gave a charm in which descriptive poetry is often found wanting. The best didactic poems, when compared with the "Task," are like formal gardens in comparison with woodland scenery. "One of his intimate friends," says Hayley, "had written in the first volume of his poems the following passage from the younger Pliny, as descriptive of the book: Multa tenuiter, multa sublimiter, multa venusté, multa teneré, multa dulciter, multa cum bile. Many passages are delicate, many sublime, many beautiful, many tender, many sweet, many acrimonious.' Cowper was pleased with the application, and candidly said, 'The latter part is very true indeed. Yes, yes; there are multa cum bile."" He was in a happier state of mind and in more cheerful circumstances when he began the "Task:" it was therefore less acrimonious. Its satire is altogether free from personality; it is the satire not of a sour and discontented spirit, but of a benevolent though melancholy mind; and the melancholy was not of a kind to affect artificial gloom and midnight musings, but rather to seek and find relief in sunshine, in the beauties of nature, in books and leisure, in solitary or social walks, and in the comforts of a quiet fireside. *

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If the world had not liked his poem, the world must have been worse than it is. But Cowper himself, perhaps, was not aware of what it was that supplied the place of plan, and with happier effect than the most skilful plan could have produced. There are no passages in a poet's works which are more carped at while he lives, than those wherein he speaks of himself; and if he has any readers after his death, there are none then which are perused with greater

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