Pursue the free Horatian song;
Old Tyne shall listen to my tale,
And echo down the bordering vale,
The liquid melody prolong.

FOR A GROTTO.

To me, whom in their lays the shepherds call
Actæa, daughter of the neighbouring stream,
This cave belongs. The fig-tree and the vine,
Which o'er the rocky entrance downward shoot,
Were placed by Glycon. He with cowslips pale,
Primrose and purple lychnis, decked the green
Before my threshold, and my shelving walls
With honeysuckle covered. Here, at noon,
Lulled by the murmur of my rising fount,
I slumber here my clustering fruits I tend,
Or from the humid flowers at break of day
Fresh garlands weave, and chase from all my bounds
Each thing impure or noxious. Enter in,

O Stranger, undismayed. Nor bat nor toad
Here lurks; and, if thy breast of blameless thoughts
Approve thee, not unwelcome shalt thou tread
My quiet mansion: chiefly if thy name
Wise Pallas and the immortal Muses own.

CHRISTOPHER SMART.

[CHRISTOPHER SMART was born at Shipbourne in Kent on April 11, 1722. He was educated at Durham School and at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, becoming a Fellow in 1745. In 1753 he married and came to live in London, where his careless habits soon brought him into grave difficulties. He was for some time out of his mind, and it was during his confinement, in an interval of sanity, that the Song to David was written. In 1770 ne closed a life in which he had known all forms of disappointment and unhappiness. His poems were first collected in 1753, and a posthumous edition in two volumes was published in 1791. The Song to David appeared in a separate quarto in 1763, and was republished in 1819 by the Rev. R. Harvey.]

The posthumous Editor of Smart's poems makes an apology for the entire exclusion of the Song to David and some other pieces on the ground that 'they were written after the author's confinement, and bear for the most part melancholy proofs of the recent estrangement of his mind. Such poems however,' he adds, 'have been selected from his pamphlets and inserted in the present work as were likely to be acceptable to the reader.' The volumes so introduced contain a curious assemblage of quite worthless verses; Seatonian prize-poems, epigrams, birthday addresses, imitations of Pope and Gay, and all else that might be expected from a facile and uninspired versifier of that date. Two generations ago Smart's name was familiar to schoolboys from his translation of Horace into prose; a work about as worthy of immortality as were his imitative verses. It is only in our own day that attention has been recalled to the single poem by which he deserves to be not only remembered, but remembered as a poet who for one short moment reached a height to which the prosaic muse of his epoch was wholly unaccustomed. There is nothing like the Song to David in the eighteenth century; there is nothing out of which it might seem

to have been developed. It is true that with great appearance of symmetry it is ill-arranged and out of proportion; its hundred stanzas weary the reader with their repetitions and with their epithets piled up on a too obvious system. But in spite of this touch of pedantry, it is the work of a poet; of a man so possessed with the beauty and fervour of the Psalms and with the high romance of the psalmist's life that in the days of his madness the character of David has become a 'fixed idea' with him, to be embodied in words and dressed in the magic robe of verse when the dark hour has gone by. There are few episodes in our literary history more interesting than this of the wretched bookseller's hack, with his mind thrown off its balance by drink and poverty, rising at the instant of his deepest distress to a pitch of poetic performance unimagined by himself at all other times, unimagined by all but one or two of his contemporaries, and so little appreciated by the public that when an edition of his writings was called for it was sent into the world with this masterpiece omitted.

EDITOR.

A SONG TO David.

VOL. IIL

O Thou that sit'st upon a throne,
With harp of high majestic tone,
To praise the King of kings;
And voice of heaven-ascending swell,
Which, while its deeper notes excel,
Clear as a clarion rings:

To bless each valley, grove and coast,
And charm the cherubs to the post
Of gratitude in throngs;

To keep the days on Zion's mount,
And send the year to his account
With dances and with songs:

O servant of God's holiest charge,
The minister of praise at large,

Which thou may'st now receive;
From thy blest mansion hail and hear,
From topmost eminence appear

To this the wreath I weave.

Great, valiant, pious, good, and clean,
Sublime, contemplative, serene,

Strong, constant, pleasant, wise!
Bright effluence of exceeding grace;
Best man!--the swiftness and the race,
The peril, and the prize!

Great-from the lustre of his crown,
From Samuel's horn and God's renown,
Which is the people's voice;
For all the host, from rear to van,
Applauded and embraced the man-
The man of God's own choice.

A a

Valiant-the word and up he rose-
The fight-he triumphed o'er his foes,
Whom God's just laws abhor;
And armed in gallant faith he took
Against the boaster, from the brook,
The weapons of the war.

Pious-magnificent and grand;
'Twas he the famous temple planned
(The seraph in his soul);

Foremost to give his Lord his dues,
Foremost to bless the welcome news,
And foremost to condole.

Good-from Jehudah's genuine vein,
From God's best nature good in grain,
His aspect and his heart;
To pity, to forgive, to save;
Witness Engedi's conscious cave,
And Shimei's blunted dart.

Clean-if perpetual prayer be pure,
And love, which could itself inure
To fasting and to fear-

Clean in his gestures, hands, and feet,
To smite the lyre, the dance complete,
To play the sword and spear.

Sublime-invention ever young,
Of vast conception, towering tongue
To God th' eternal theme;
Notes from yon exaltations caught,
Unrivalled royalty of thought

O'er meaner strains supreme.

Contemplative-on God to fix
His musings, and above the six

The sabbath-day he blest;

'Twas then his thoughts self-conquest pruned, And heavenly melancholy tuned,

To bless and bear the rest.