and thus, while waiting for death, she raves most eloquent music.

"Let me not have this gloomy view

About my room, around my bed;

But morning roses wet with dew,

To cool my burning brows instead.
As flowers that once in Eden grew,
Let them their fragrant spirit shed;
And every day the sweets renew,

Till I, a fading flower, am dead.

"Oh, let the herbs I loved to rear

Give to my sense their perfum❜d breath;

Let them be placed above my bier,

And grace the gloomy house of death.

I'll have my grave beneath a hill,
Where only Lucy's self shall know;
Where runs the pure, pellucid rill,
Upon the gravelly bed below:

"There violets on the borders blow,

And insects their soft light display;
Till, as the morning sunbeams glow,
The cold phosphoric fires decay.

"That is the grave to Lucy shown,
The soil a pure and silver sand,
The green, cold moss, above it grown,
Unpluck'd by all but maiden-hand :

Our theme has been serious, but not, I trust, unpleasant. We have discoursed of the human heart and the human life. How mighty is this human heart, with all its complicated energies; this living source of all that moves the world! Who would not have it? Who

would not have it, even despite of its wanderings and mistakes; with all its sins, its sorrows, and its wrongs. Yes, who would not have it still; with its grief as well as ecstasy, its anguish as well as exultation? Who would not have this full and mighty human heart, this treasury of noble impulses, so aspiring, so sublime ! this temple of liberty, this kingdom of heaven, this altar of God, this throne of goodness, so beautiful in holiness, so generous in love! Who would not have it in freedom, ay, in the delirium of freedom, rather than in the slavery of an iron necessity, or the apathy of a stupid instinct? How mysterious is this human life, with all its diversities of contrast and compensation; this web of chequered destinies, this sphere of manifold allotment, where man lives in his greatness and grossness, a little lower than the angels, a little higher than the brutes; where death walks hand in hand with life, and sin with sanctity, and agony with delight; where the procession of the burial mingles with that of the bridal, and the graspings of despair pierce through the wild choruses of revelry; where the castle overlooks the hut, and the palace fronts the prison; and the throne is raised over the hollow of the dungeon; and one man commands a world, and another pines away existence within the circumference of his chain; yet where all have substantial pleasures, and

substantial pains, which no condition can entirely destroy, pleasures which the most wretched cannot lose, pains which the most favored must endure. We have in this imperfect scene but a fragment of our story; its opening is here, its issues are in eternity; the hour approaches when the secrets of every heart shall be opened, and the mystery of every life be made known ; till then, the wisdom of the heart is faith, and the majesty of the life is virtue.

THE MORAL PHILOSOPHY

OF

BYRON'S LIFE.

To select for a popular discourse, a topic on which so much has been written, and written finely, may seem an undertaking of considerable presumption. But a theme so full of moral import is not readily exhausted; and an individual impression, however humble, may not, even on this subject, be without its value and its place. And now that the spell of the poet's presence does not enthrall us, we are in a position to form an impartial opinion, and we may dare to express it. This was scarcely the case before. Prejudices in favor of Byron or against him, with which we have no concern, operated on his contemporaries; and the enthusiasm which, while his thrilling tones were fresh in men's hearing, blunted the moral sense and silenced the moral judgment, has long become sobered. Admired for the splendor of his genius, and feared for its power, the