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Whose thunder is its knell; he, as I guess,
Had gazed on nature's naked loveliness,
Actæon like- * * * * * *
A pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift-
A love in desolation masked; a power
Girt round with weakness; it can scarce uplift
The weight of the superincumbent hour.

His head was bound with pansies over blown,
And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue;

And a light spear topp'd with a cypress cone,
Round whose rude shaft dark ivy-tresses grew
Yet dripping with the forest's noon-day dew,
Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart

Shook the weak hand that grasp'd it; of that crew
He came the last, neglected and apart;

A herd-abandoned deer, struck by the hunter's dart."

Of all the poets, it seems to me there was in Shelley's bosom the fondest sympathy, the chastest thought, and the sweetest beauty, pale and tremulous as moon-beams on the bosom of the lake, ruffled by the breath of the winds. Like an Eolian harp, tremblingly alive through all its chords, his soul sent out divinest music, soft and merry as a sunbeam, or ravishingly mournful, like the broken murmurs of an angel's dream. Whatever breath might sweep its strings, in joy or sorrow, tones of melting beauty answered to its touch. His own heart was like

his "Sensitive Plant"

"A sensitive plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it open'd its fan-like leaves to the light,
And closed them beneath the kisses of night."

Such was Shelley. Such, to an extent, are all poets; but Shelley more than they all. Byron was somewhat different. There was in his soul a terrible strength, a gloomy grandeur, black as the wings of the storm darkly hovering over abysses, gray with accumulating ruin. But for all that terrible strength of Byron, there was still the sweet sympathy and the pure love in him; else he were no poet.

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While Byron was at Harrow he saw some tyrant, whose name I forget, abusing young Peel in a most inhuman manner, by inflicting a kind of bastinado on the inner fleshy side of the arm, which, says Mr. Moore, was twisted round with some degree of technical skill to render the operation more painful." While poor Peel was writhing under the stripes, Byron looked on with eyes flashing with fire, and a heart bursting with sympathy, and at length asked the school-master how many more stripes he intended to inflict! Why, what is that to you, replied the savage. "Because, if you please," said young Byron, holding out his arm, "I would take half." It is not possible to conceive of a more beautiful heroism, or of a purer mixture of simplicity and magnanimity than is here displayed. And yet how soon you shall see the same sympathizing heart, filled with defiance and misery, shaking contempt and fire-coals upon his whole race; when afterwards he bestrode the world like a Colossus, and laughed to see it writhe, and plunge, and flounce, like a wounded gladiator-reserving still within his bosom a bitterer scorn. They are fierce passions that sleep there in the calm of life. Like the green waters of lake Erie, though they lie so still and quiet,

meaningless there now, yet are they the daring waters that shall thunder down Niagara. If that volcanic heart were calmed to sleep by an angel's smile-washed clean of the hot lava from its broken crater by the tear that melts in sorrow's eye, the first harsh gust of life startled the sleeping fires from their bed, into flames that flashed in the face of the world.

"Have I not

Hear me, my mother earth! behold it, Heaven!
Have I not had to wrestle with my lot?

Have I not suffer'd things to be forgiven?

Have I not had my brain sear'd, my heart riven,
Hopes sapp'd, name blighted, life's life lied away?
And only not to desperation driven,

Because not altogether of such clay

As rots into the souls of those whom I survey."

Yet not long shall this sullen mood remain on a poet's heart. One kiss of love shall wipe it off for ever. A smile on beauty's brow will clear the storms out of these heavens, and leave a revelry of sunbeams over-head and all around. And the pure heart, disencumbered from earth's grossness, shall sing in softest numbers,

"Oh! that the desert were my dwelling-place,
With one fair spirit for my minister,
That I might all forget the human race,
And hating no one, love but only her.
Ye elements! in whose ennobling stir
I feel myself exalted-can ye not

Accord me such a being! Do I err

In deeming such may inhabit many a spot?

Though to converse with them can rarely be our lot."

Thus does the heart shift from storm to calm; and hang vibrating for ever betwixt a smile and tear. Such was Byron. With him the storm was dreadful; the heavens and the earth were full of it; and the tear was hot and heavy, nor could it flow and find relief; it sunk like molten lead upon his soul, and burned into the core, till quenched in waters of resentment there. But the smile was deep, and the sorrowing earth was glad for it. It came up out of the heart, it went down into the heart again. We have all been merrier that he was merry, as we have all been sadder that he was sad. For, say what we will to the contrary, we have bowed at the shrine of his genius. By a law of our being we are prostrated there. Genius will be worshipped, whether we will or For its faults it will be pitied too, which we grieve to say are many. Its dangers, interwoven with its very temperament, are too apparent to be unseen, and too melancholy to be unpitied. When we remember the fate of Shakspeare, of Drayton, Pope, Addison, Dryden, Cowley, of rare old Ben Jonson, of the gifted Parnell, or the lovable Charles Lamb, we go and hide our face in blushes, and wash them off with the tears of our eyes.

no.

It is well known, however, to literary men, that when the accusing spirit flew up to heaven's chancery with uncle Toby's sin, the recording angel, as he wrote it down, dropt a tear upon it and blotted it out for If yet there is another tear in heaven's chancery, I will hope it may be shed on these inheritors of weakness. For plain enough, if

ever.

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poet's have in them somewhat of earth and devil, they have more of man and deity. They are the virgin light, bent and stained it may be, in falling through the atmosphere of earth; but the virgin light. Genius is the last touch, the highest finish which the hand of God has given to his intellectual works. It never shed a selfish tear; a passionless smile it never knew. But it pays dear for importing its smiles and tears from heaven; they scald and burn, and too soon are quenched in the cold brow of earth. The liveliest coals are soonest consumed by the puff of the winds.

Editor's Department.

HENRY STUART PATTERSON, M. D.

We present our readers in this number with the portrait, engraved in Sartain's best style, of a valued contributor, whose productions we trust' will become more numerous in our pages. We are aware that professional and other duties have diverted Dr. Patterson's attention, to some extent, from the path of general literature; but the contributions he has already made to our columns show that his mind is awake to the great questions that agitate the community, that he can find time to keep up with the rapid paces of modern Science, and that he has a voice worthy to be heard, and which must be heard, in the shaping of the future, that sometimes lowers, sometimes brightens, ominous-hopeful before us. Of course we offer no biography of our contributor. The life of a private civilian has few points of interest. It matters little what school a man went to, or where he pursues his calling. What manner of man is he? is rather the question one would propound concerning him, if he is worthy to be known at all. As things go, the mere educational and social environments of a man have not a great deal to do with the determination of that question. School education is unfortunately of especially little account. It belongs to the past, savors of the past, turns its eyes always lovingly to the things that are behind, forgetting those that are before, and the apostolic injunction concerning them. The man who has enjoyed it, equally with him who has not, must begin again for himself at the very alphabet of social, political, and all other profound science, and stand alone and unaided before the mighty problems, which the unfortunate school, spell-bound by sect and party, has never dared to look in the face. He who does this, leaves the schools behind him, and goes forth into broad fields of new thought and far-reaching speculation, where he must doubtless meet, and if he can may slay, monsters dire enough; but where also he may join himself to the noble army of Progress, the pioneers of the onward march of Humanity. This we claim that the subject of our sketch has done, and we therefore give him a place on our pages.

Dr. Patterson is a free man. That is the first requisite to usefulness, and, much more, to any distinction worth the having in our day. He is free, because made so by the truth. Goethe has said that Bacon's merit consisted in being the sponge that wiped out all previous philoso

phy. Not that it was all wrong: far from that. But he destroyed the authority claimed by that philosophy from the mere fact that it was dominant and universally recognised. He saw that it must stand before the bar of intellect, to be tried over and over again continually for ever. Each new student is a new judge, who is to take nothing for settled, but to try the cause again for himself ab initio. He must apply the sponge unsparingly, and then proceed to work out the problem anew from its first elements. He may have elements not possessed by his predecessors; they may have left him precious data for his labors, but he must do the work for himself. In no other way can the result be true to him. There must be no taking conclusions for granted. Prejudice must be discarded as essentially falsehood. Authority must be denied to the very face. The student must demand of every doctrine, no matter how enthroned and crowned, an exhibition of its title to recognition and dominion. If it cannot present a charter with the broad seal of truth, it is to be denied, discarded, contended against. This Dr. Patterson has done. He brings to the examination of each topic a mind divested of prejudice and bigotry. He desires to recognise and accept the truth always and everywhere. Ancient error has no charms for him. A falsehood is none the more respectable to him because it is as old as Methuselah. The idols of the nations are only stocks and stones to him, although generations have fallen down and worshipped them as their comfort in life and hope in death. But with all this freedom, he is no destructive. He is no more blind to old truth than to new, and avoids as much the fanaticism which sees no good in the old, as he does the bigotry which sees only evil in the new. Strong - men and heroes lived in the ages that are gone. Piercing thoughts and eloquent words illuminated the former centuries, perhaps as much as our own. It is doubtless the enchantment of distance that makes us believe that "there were giants in those days;" but there were nevertheless mighty men. To ignore all that they have done, is folly as great as it is to make them the masters of our soul and intellect. We have reached heights beyond their thought or hope, because we have travelled the road they cut for us with infinite toil and pain, through the gloomy and monster-peopled wilderness. Their rugged labor has smoothed our path to the sunlit heights of wisdom, and while we smile at their follies and reject their errors, we should thankfully remember their services, and take what good they can present. They that hewed and fitted the timbers in the far forests of Lebanon, are not to be forgotten when the temple is raised with shouting. They could not foretell its fair proportions, but they worked wisely as they knew, and their labor was not in vain. The destructive is he who would madly reject their material, and build solely with what he can individually collect, even if it is but hay and stubble. The true reformer does not so. Reform implies the preserved individuality and integrity of the thing re-formed and amended, not its abolition. To change our figure again, the Reformer is the orthopedic surgeon, who, by his wise appliances, straightens and remodels the deformed limb, while the Destructive is the audacious quack who mercilessly lops it off, and the Conservative is the ignorant doubter who would rather let the patient limp into his grave than venture on the ap

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