Green as of old each olived portal smiles,
And still the Graces build my Grecian piles :
My Gothic spires in ancient glory rise,

And dare with wonted pride to rush into the skies.

VOL. III.

FROM THE FIRST OF APRIL.'

Scant along the ridgy land

The beans their new-born ranks expand:
The fresh-turned soil with tender blades
Thinly the sprouting barley shades:
Fringing the forest's devious edge,
Half robed appears the hawthorn hedge;
Or to the distant eye displays
Weakly green its budding sprays.

The swallow, for a moment seen,
Skims in haste the village green :
From the gray moor, on feeble wing,
The screaming plovers idly spring:
The butterfly, gay-painted soon,
Explores awhile the tepid noon;
And fondly trusts its tender dyes
To fickle suns, and flattering skies.

Fraught with a transient, frozen shower,
If a cloud should haply lower,
Sailing o'er the landscape dark,
Mute on a sudden is the lark;
But when gleams the sun again
O'er the pearl-besprinkled plain,
And from behind his watery veil

Looks through the thin descending hail;
She mounts, and, lessening to the sight,
Salutes the blithe return of light,

And high her tuneful track pursues
Mid the dim rainbow's scattered hues.

CC

Where in venerable rows

Widely waving oaks inclose
The moat of yonder antique hall,
Swarm the rooks with clamorous call;
And to the toils of nature true,
Wreath their capacious nests anew.

Musing through the lawny park,
The lonely poet loves to mark
How various greens in faint degrees
Tinge the tall groups of various trees;
While, careless of the changing year,
The pine cerulean, never sere,
Towers distinguished from the rest,
And proudly vaunts her winter vest.

Within some whispering osier isle,
Where Glym's low banks neglected smile;
And each trim meadow still retains
The wintry torrent's oozy stains:
Beneath a willow, long forsook,

The fisher seeks his customed nook;
And bursting through the crackling sedge,
That crowns the current's caverned edge,
He startles from the bordering wood
The bashful wild-duck's early brood.

O'er the broad downs, a novel race, Frisk the lambs with faltering pace, And with eager bleatings fill

The foss that skirts the beaconed hill.

His free-born vigour yet unbroke To lordly man's usurping yoke, The bounding colt forgets to play, Basking beneath the noon-tide ray, And stretched among the daisies pied Of a green dingle's sloping side: While far beneath, where nature spreads Her boundless length of level meads,

In loose luxuriance taught to stray
A thousand tumbling rills inlay
With silver veins the vale, or pass
Redundant through the sparkling grass.

Yet, in these presages rude,
Midst her pensive solitude,
Fancy, with prophetic glance,
Sees the teeming months advance;
The field, the forest, green and gay,
The dappled slope, the tedded hay;
Sees the reddening orchard blow,
The harvest wave, the vintage flow;
Sees June unfold his glossy robe
Of thousand hues o'er all the globe;
Sees Ceres grasp her crown of corn,
And Plenty load her ample horn.

SONNET WRITTEN IN A BLANK LEAF OF

DUGDALE'S 'MONASTICON.'

Deem not devoid of elegance the sage,
By Fancy's genuine feelings unbeguiled,
Of painful pedantry the poring child,

Who turns, of these proud domes, th' historic page,
Now sunk by Time, and Henry's fiercer rage.
Think'st thou the warbling Muses never smiled
On his lone hours? Ingenuous views engage
His thoughts, on themes, unclassic falsely styled,
Intent. While cloistered Piety displays

Her mouldering roll, the piercing eye explores
New manners, and the pomp of elder days,
Whence culls the pensive bard his pictured stores
Nor rough nor barren are the winding ways
Of hoar Antiquity, but strown with flowers.

TO THE RIVER LODON.

Ah! what a weary race my feet have run,
Since first I trod thy banks with alders crowned,
And thought my way was all through fairy ground,
Beneath thy azure sky, and golden sun,

Where first my Muse to lisp her notes begun!
While pensive Memory traces back the round,
Which fills the varied interval between ;

Much pleasure, more of sorrow, marks the scene.
Sweet native stream! those skies and suns so pure
No more return, to cheer my evening road;
Yet still one joy remains, that not obscure,
Nor useless, all my vacant days have flowed,

From youth's gay dawn to manhood's prime mature;
Nor with the Muse's laurel unbestowed

CHARLES CHURCHILL.

[CHARLES CHURCHILL was born in Westminster in 1731, and died at Boulogne in 1764. A poor London curate, who eked out his salary by teaching, he made a hit by his Rosciad, a satire on contemporary actors, in 1761, and during the brief residue of his life abandoned himself to literature and dissipation.]

The celebrity of the smart versemaking of Churchill marks a low point in English taste. It nearly secured him a poet's monument in Westminster, Abbey; and it actually secured a poet's rank for a petulant rhymer without a spark of the poet's imagination, of cold heart, natural bad taste, and very little knowledge of that narrow world which he so impudently lampooned. Nothing in Churchill reveals a gleam of genial feeling, or justifies the suspicion that he could take any pleasure in what refines or elevates. If we may believe his own account of himself, nature had given him little enough, beyond an ugly face, a sour temperament, and a bitter tongue. Yet he was not dissatisfied. He was very willing to be taken for what he was: and if he could not win liking and respect, he was content to be feared. In all this there must have been something of affectation. Yet it is only too clear that the coarse texture of his mind was impermeable to the kindlier and worthier influences of his time. What it most readily absorbed was that hatred of authority in general which keen observers saw widely spread in England long before it convulsed society in France and poverty, obscurity, and habits of monotonous toil, sadly evinced by the industry with which he practised his new-found trade, had even in youth embittered a sour nature, and made him a Jacobin at heart. At all aristocracy, social, political, and intellectual, Churchill railed with vicious delight. The artificiality of his times revolted him with better reason. But with all his boasting of