One summer day, ere the sun went down,
She lay in her little bed,

And the last, lingering glorious rays
Played 'round her cherub head.
The eyes I loved so well were closed,
And her hand had an icy chill;

I thought my life was bound with hers,
And yet I lingered still.

Oh! then I knelt with bitter tears,
Where my dead sister lay,

And I heard a still, small spirit-voice,
In gentle accents say,

"Hush thee, poor mourner! murmur not,

To comfort thee I've come;

God loved the little angel,

And so he called her home!

"And the flowers are there immortal,
And the birds have golden wings,
And they dead sister thrills with the life
Which from God's presence springs."
Then I said, "Show me this land,
Where it is safe to love;"
And as the spirit soared away,
She murmured, ""Tis above."

Brockport, N. J., June, 1848.

LECTURES ON SHAKSPEARE.

By H. N. HUDSON. Baker and Scribner, New York.

There is no better test of an author's ability than to take up an old subject on which every variety of mind has expended itself for ages, and without any new facts or helps, render it fresh and attractive. These lectures, now collected in a book form, were delivered a year or two since in New York and Boston, to perhaps the most intelligent and accomplished audiences the cities could furnish. Without any of the clap-trap accessories so often employed to obtain admiration, they secured it by their intrinsic merit alone. To clear thought and a true style, Mr. Hudson adds impulsiveness of feeling and vigor of expression. His unbounded reverence for Shakespeare does not dull the edge of his criticism, or weaken the power of his analysis. Some have objected to these lectures, on the ground that he has made far more out of the characters than

Shakspeare himself ever dreamed of. The latter simply caused them to speak naturally, without any reference to art whatever. But as in reading Shakspeare, we care not whether his Richard III is the Richard III of history, and think only of the character as drawn by his pen, so in listening to Mr. Hudson, we care not whether the bard's creations were effected by synthesis, or subjected afterwards to strict analysis; we are delighted with the perfection they present and the close investigation they will bear. Indeed, we do not see what else is left a man, except to show how this great genius, in being a lover himself, obliged all the lovers of true art. As Minerva sprang full-armed from the head of the god, so does every character emerge from the soul of this great wizard, perfect in all its proportions, complete in all its accessories. To unfold this, is to reveal the greatness of Shakspeare, or in other words, make us comprehend what we before knew but did not understand; that nature cannot furnish a better Jew than Shylock, .or a completer devil than lago, or a nobler woman than Cordelia, or a more perfect wife than Imogene, or indeed a character of any hue from Caliban to Bottom, truer than he has given us in the great wonder. Yet we do not fully appreciate this, till some gifted mind analyzes, compares and tests each character in turn. Johnson, Coleridge, Mrs. Jameson, Hazlitt, and a host of others, have undertaken this task, and added to our stock of knowledge and increased our admiration, but Mr. Hudson stands in a better position than either. With the results of all combined before him, and viewing them generously and freely, he has also given us the product of his own reflections. Possessing great originality himself, the thoughts of others have become as it were his own in passing through his mind; or in other words, after furnishing himself with all the helps in his reach, he has given us not a compilation, not a collection of opinions, but a complete original work as distinctly and strongly marked as if he were the first man that ever wrote on Shakspeare.

His antithetical mode of saying things, nay, his very alliterations give a movement and vigor to his sentences that hurry the reader on so, that what he took up perhaps as a dry analysis, he finds he cannot lay down without an effort.

A large part of the first volume is devoted to Shakspeare himself, and the times in which he lived. We cannot give an adequate idea of the author's excellence or style, without extensive quotations, and if we were required to select from the different plays, we should hardly know which to choose. He first gives the plot and then takes up the principal characters and analyzes them. The tragedies, perhaps, from the very characters necessary to them, possess more interest than the other plays. Hamlet and Macbeth are huge creations that make us tremble as we contemplate them. The midnight grave, the murderous deed, the cries of conscience and the still copse, enchain us more than the jokes of the buffoon, the retorts of the wit or the passionate language of the lover.

think Mr. Hudson's analysis of Hamlet, by far the best ever furnished. We rather suspect he felt the character as inuch as he studied it, and come to his conclusions more by consciousness than by thought. As a specimen of his antithetical style, we give a short extract from "Taming of the Shrew:"

The lord and the tinker are the two extremes of society; so much so, indeed, that they well nigh meet round on the other side, as extremes are apt to do. There is just about as much gold in the one character as in the other; only in the lord it is all on the outside, in the shape of gilding; in the tinker it is all at the centre, in the shape of a kernel. And it is doubtful which be the more ludicrous or the most dignified, the ennui which drives the one to seek sport in duping a sot, or the sottishness which makes the other dupable into the belief of his being a lord. The irony of the thing, for it is ironical withal, is, that if a man be removed from the gutter to the palace, he changes his place only, not his mind. Under his temporary hallucination, the tinker resigns his name, but not his character; is deluded out of his experiences, but not out of his appetites and aptitudes; consents to forget his neighbors, but not his ale; and his occasional remarks, during the following play, are plainly the offspring of the old man, not of the new additions. Sly, for that is the tinker's name, is evidently no very remote kin of Sancho Panza, epitomized and Anglicized: one can almost fancy one hears him giving thanks to the inventor of drink, as his elder brother did to the inventor of sleep. The entire prelude is read in ten minutes; yet it reveals the character of the whole family of Slies. They "came in with Richard the conqueror," and "are no rogues," nor any thing else, indeed, but pedlers, bear-herds, tinkers, and drinkers "of pots o' the smallest ale."-A light, aerial grace, touched occasionally with the richest colors of poetry, hovers over this most expressive of trifles. If forced to give up the prelude or the play, it would be difficult for me to choose between them, much as I value the latter."

His analysis of Shylock is able and just. Indeed the tendency of Mr. Hudson's mind is to look with fairness on the worst of characters, so that he analyzes usually as well as intellectually with consumate skill. In the proscribed, persecuted, despised and degraded Jew, he sees a man with all the feelings and impulses of a man, made what he is by the injustice of others, rather than by his own innate wickedness. Hated by all, why should he not hate all? having no money extended to him, why should he extend it to others? Says Mr. Hudson of him:

"SHYLOCK is one of those inconceivable masterpieces wherein the poet's skill is forgotten in the perfection of the work; he seems so much a man of nature's making, that we can scarce accord to Shakspeare the merit of creating him. A true representative of his nation, of course his two absorbing passions, are love of money and hatred of Christians: both of which passions are the almost inevitable result of his origin and situation; of a national pride which

for ages never ceased to provoke hostility, but which no hostility could ever subdue; of a national thrift which never ceased to invite rapacity, but which no rapacity could ever exhaust; and of a national weakness, which, while it exposed them to wrong, only engendered the deeper hate, because it left them without the means or the hope of redress. Such is that wonderful people, whose nationality has survived the utmost dispersion, the fiercest persecution, the rise and fall of the greatest empires; a people whom no distance can separate, no proximity confound; and who, a monument at once of heaven's favor and of heaven's justice, seem doomed forever to attest the truth of a dispensation whose benefits they are never to enjoy. And such is Shylock; a type of national sufferings, of national sympathies and national antipathies. Himself an object of bitter insult and scorn to those about him; surrounded by enemies whom he is at once too proud to conciliate, and too weak to oppose; he can have no life among them but money; no hold on them but interest; no feeling towards them but hate; no indemnity out of them but revenge. Nothing he can do, will purchase him any thing but obloquy and contempt; no gush of humanity, no sacrifice of disinterestedness, will silence or soften the prejudices against his nation; and of course, the seeds of generosity originally implanted in his nature, instead of springing up into beauty and fragrance, have become congealed or petrified into malignity and selfishness. As the law allows no such principle as equity towards him, so he will acknowledge none in his interpretation of it. Its spirit being avowedly his foe, he does not scruple to make its letter his friend. It is not strange, therefore, that mercy speaks to him in vain; he has long looked to others for mercy, and has not found even justice; and therefore when others look to him for mercy, he will not give even justice. The prophecies of Scripture against his nation have been turned into a patent for persecuting him; therefore he turns the ancient prerogatives of his nation into a patent for cursing them; and returns their Christian intolerance with Jewish obstinacy. The more they close their arms and doors against him, the faster he clings to his national faith; his very language seems to have been circumcised, and to have gone to school to the synagogue. Such is the natural effect of intolerance upon helpless, defenceless pride; producing the widest separation of feeling and character among those who are the nearest together in place.

But with these national peculiarities Shylock unites the deepest and strongest individuality; thoroughly and intensely Jewish, he is not more a Jew than he is Shylock. Endowed with the finest gifts of nature, the wrongs he has suffered and the pride he has opposed to them, have dried all the sap of humanity out of him, but have left his noble intellect standing entire. With as much elasticity of mind as stiffness of neck, every step he takes, but the last, is as firm as the earth he treads upon; every reason he advances is perfectly unanswerable, except in a single instance where he chooses to rely on the antiquities of his own nation rather than on his own

resources. Nothing can daunt, nothing can disconcert him; remonstrance cannot move, ridicule cannot touch, obloquy cannot exasperate him when he has not provoked them, he has been forced to bear them; and now when he does provoke them, he is hardened against them. In a word he may be outreasoned, he cannot be outwilled; he may be broken, he cannot be bent."

It very often occurs that a writer capable of conceiving and expressing admirably the character of a man, fails grievously in describing that of a woman. Cooper, for instance, draws a wild Indian with graphic power, but spoils every female character he attempts to portray. The flexile movement, gushing feelings, warm impulses, delicate sentiment and exquisite sensibilities of the latter, disappear under his rough hand. So also one who will analyze a Romeo with wonderful ability, fails in a Hamlet or Macbeth. But Mr. Hudson is equally successful in depicting Juliet and Desdemona, or Lady Macbeth, and Iago and Hamlet. He understands all the rougher and sterner feelings of the monk, as well as the more delicate susceptibilities of a woman; he can draw in dark, strong lines the character of a murderer and a villain, as well as pencil softly the more hidden and impalpable virtues of one who has been made "a little better" than an angel. Indeed, this peculiar form of adaptation possessed by so few, is indispensably necessary to one who would write on Shakspeare. Johnson with all his ability never made a woman without a beard. One always says after reading his description of one,

"I spy a great beard under her muffler. I do not like a woman with a beard."

Mrs. Jameson on the contrary, cannot fully appreciate such a character as Hamlet. Mr. Hudson excels in this respect, and seems speaking a different language when passing from a Caliban to a Perdita. As an example take the following extract from his lecture on "Winter's Tale," where he describes Florizell and Perdita: "Perdita is a fine illustration of native intelligence as distinguished from artificial acquirements, and of inborn dignity bursting through all the disadvantages of the humblest station. Schlegel somewhere says, "Shakspeare is particularly fond of showing the superiority of the innate over the acquired;" but he has nowhere done it more beautifully than in this unfledged angel,

"The prettiest low-born lass that ever

Ran on the green sward; nothing she does or seems
But smacks of something greater than herself."

Just as much a queen as if she were brought up at court, and just as much a shepherdess as if she were born a shepherd's daughter, the graces of the princely and the simplicities of the pastoral character seem striving which shall express her loveliest. She is not a poetical being; she is poetry itself; and every thing lends or borrows beauty at her touch. A playmate of the flowers, when we see them together, we can hardly tell whether they take more inspiration from her, or she takes more from thein; and while she becomes