I was

HEN I was younger, fond of wandering in solitary places, and never was afraid of slumbering in woods and grottoes. Among the chief pleasures of my life, and among the commonest of my occupations, was the bringing before me such heroes and heroines of antiquity, such poets and sages, such of the prosperous and of the unfortunate, as most interested me by their courage, their wisdom, their eloquence or their adventures. Engaging them in the conversation best suited to their characters, I knew perfectly their manners, their steps, their voices; and often did I moisten with my tears the models I had been forming of the less happy. Great is the privilege of entering into the studies of the intellectual; great is that of conversing with the guides of nations, the movers of the mass, the regulators of the unruly will, stiff in its impurity and rash against the finger of the Almighty Power that formed it; but give me rather the creature to sympathize with, apportion me the sufferings to assuage. Allegory had few attractions for me, believing it to be the delight, in general, of idle, frivolous, inexcursive minds in whose mansions there is neither hall nor portal to receive the loftier of the passions. A stranger to the affections, she holds a low station among the handmaidens of Poetry, being fit for little but an apparition in a mask.

I had reflected for some time on this subject, when, wearied with the length of my walk over the mountains and finding a soft old molehill covered with gray grass by the wayside, I laid my head upon it and slept. I cannot tell how long it was before a species of dream, or vision, came over me.

Two beautiful youths appeared beside me. Each was winged, but the wings were hanging down and seemed ill-adapted to flight. One of them, whose voice was the softest I ever heard, looking at me frequently, said to the other,

"He is under my guardianship for the present: do not awaken him with that feather."

Methought, on hearing the whisper, I saw something like the feather of an arrow, and then the arrow itself, the whole of it, even to the point, although he carried it in such a manner that it was difficult at first to discover more than a palm's length of it; the rest of the shaft (and the whole of the barb) was behind his ankles.

"This feather never awakens any one," replied he, rather petulantly, "but it brings more of confident security and more of cherished dreams than you, without me, are capable of imparting."

"Be it so," answered the gentler; "none is less inclined to quarrel or dispute than I am. Many whom you have wounded grievously call upon me for succor; but so little am I disposed to thwart you it is seldom I venture to do more for them than to whisper a few words of comfort in passing.

How many reproaches on these occasions have been cast upon me for indifference and infidelity! Nearly as many, and nearly in the same terms, as upon you.”

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Odd enough that we, O Sleep, should be thought so alike!" said Love, contemptuously. "Yonder is he who bears a nearer resemblance to you; the dullest have observed it." I fancied I turned my eyes to where he was pointing, and saw at a distance the figure he designated.

Meanwhile, the contention went on uninterruptedly. Sleep was slow in asserting his power or his benefits. Love recapitulated them, but only that he might assert his own above them. Suddenly he called on me to decide and to choose my patron. Under the influence, first of the one, then of the other, I sprang from repose to rapture, I alighted from rapture on repose, and knew not which was sweetest. Love was very angry with me, and declared he would cross me throughout the whole of my existence. Whatever I might on other occasions have thought of his veracity, I now felt too surely the conviction that he would keep his word.

At last, before the close of the altercation, the third genius had advanced, and stood near us. I cannot tell how I knew him, but I knew him to be the genius of Death. Breathless as I was at beholding him, I soon became familiar with his features. First they seemed only calm, presently they grew contemplative, and lastly beautiful: those of the Graces themselves are less regular, less harmonious, less composed. Love glanced at him unsteadily, with a countenance in which there was somewhat of anxiety, somewhat of disdain, and cried,

Go away! go away! Nothing that thou touchest lives."

"Say rather, child," replied the advancing form, and, advancing, grew loftier and statelier-" say rather that nothing of beautiful or of glorious lives its own true life until my wing hath passed over it."

Love pouted and rumpled and bent down. with his forefinger the stiff, short feathers on his arrow-head, but replied not. Although he frowned worse than ever, and at me, I dreaded him less and less, and scarcely looked toward him.

The milder and calmer genius, the third, in proportion as I took courage to contemplate him, regarded me with more and more complacency. He held neither flower nor arrow, as the others did, but, throwing back the clusters of dark curls that overshadowed his countenance, he presented to me his hand openly and benignly. I shrank on looking at him so near, and yet I sighed to love him. He smiled, not without an expression of pity, at perceiving my diffidence, my timidity; for I remembered how soft was the hand of Sleep, how warm and entrancing was Love's. By degrees I grew ashamed of my ingratitude, and, turning my face away, I held out my arms and felt my neck within his. Composure allayed all the throbbings of my bosom, the coolness of freshest morning breathed around, the heavens seemed to open above me, while the beautiful cheek of my deliverer rested on my head.

I would now have looked for those others, but, knowing my intention by my gesture, he said consolatorily,

"Sleep is on his way to the earth, where many are calling him; but it is not to them he hastens, for every call only makes him fly

farther off. Sedately and gravely as he looks, he is nearly as capricious and volatile as the more arrogant and ferocious one.

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And Love," said I-" whither is he departed? If not too late, I would propitiate and appease him.”

"He who cannot follow me, he who cannot overtake and pass me," said the genius, "is unworthy of the name, the most glorious in earth or heaven. Look up! Love is yonder, and ready to receive thee."

I looked. The earth was under me; I saw only the clear blue sky and something brighter above it.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.

At the death of his father the poet found himself in possession of an extensive estate, but, longing for a life of greater freedom and less monotony than that of an English country gentleman, he sold his patrimony and took up his abode on the Continent, where he resided during the rest of his life, with occasional visits to his native country. The republican spirit which led him to take part as a volunteer in the Spanish rising of 1808 continued to burn fiercely to the last. He even went so far as to defend tyrannicide, and boldly offered a pension to the widow of any one who would murder a despot. Between 1820 and 1830 he was engaged upon his greatest work, Imaginary Conversations

born in 1775. His father was a gentleman of good family and wealthy circumstances residing in Warwickshire. The son entered Rugby at an early age, and thence proceeded to Trinity College, Oxford. Like many others who have taken important literary positions, he left the university without a degree; and though intended at first for the army, and afterward for the bar, he declined both professions and threw himself into literature, with the assistance of a liberal allowance from his father. In 1795 his first work-a volume of poems-appeared, followed early in the present century by a. translation into Latin of "Geber," one of his own English poems. Landor had no small facility in classical composition, and he appeared to have the power of transporting himself into the times and sentiments of Greece and Rome. This is clearly seen in "Heroic Idylls" (1820), in Latin, and the reproduction of Greek thought in The Hellenics is one of the most successful efforts of its kind.

followed in 1831 by Poems, Letters by a Conservative, Satire on Satirists (1836), Pentameron and Pentalogue (1837), and a long series in prose and poetry, of which the chief are The Hellenics, enlarged and completed, Dry Sticks Fagoted, and The Last Fruit off an old Tree. He resided toward the close of his life at Bath, but some four or five years before his death a libel on a lady, for which he was condemned to pay heavy damages, drove him again from his country, and he retired to his Italian home near Florence, and there in serene old age "the Nestor of English poets," one of the last literary links with the age of the French republic, passed quietly away. He died on the 17th of September, 1864, an exile from his country, misunderstood, from the very individuality of his genius, by the majority of his countrymen, but highly appreciated by those who could rightly estimate the works. he has left behind him.

THOMAS BUDD SHAW.