natural phenomena-has great felicity of diction and expression and altogether possesses more of the power and fertility of the master than any other of the author's works.

Besides the works we have enumerated, Mr. Montgomery •threw off a number of small effusions, published in different periodicals, and short translations from Dante and Petrarch. On his retirement in 1825 from the invidious station' of newspaper editor, which he had maintained for more than thirty years, through good report and evil report, his friends and neighbours of Sheffield, of every shade of political and religious distinction invited him to a public entertainment, at which the late Earl Fitzwilliam presided. There the happy and grateful poet 'ran through the story of his life even from his boyish days,' when he came amongst them, friendless and a stranger, from his retirement at Fulneck among the Moravian brethren, by whom he was educated in all but knowledge of the world. He spoke with pardonable pride of the success which had crowned his labours as an author. 'Not, indeed,' he said 'with fame and fortune, as these were lavished on my greater contemporaries, in comparison with whose magnificent possessions on the British Parnassus my small plot of ground is no more than Naboth's vineyard to Ahab's kingdom; but it is my own; it is no copyhold; I borrowed it, I leased it from none. Every foot of it I enclosed from the common myself; and I can say that not an inch which I had once gained have I ever lost.' In 1830 and 1831 Mr. Montgomery was selected to deliver a course of lectures at the Royal Institution on Poetry and General Literature, which he prepared for the press, and published in 1833. A pension of £200 per annum was, at the instance of Sir Robert Peel, conferred upon Mr. Montgomery, which he enjoyed till his death in 1854, at the ripe age of eighty-three. A collected edition of his works, with autobiographical and illustrative matter, was issued in 1841 in four volumes, and Memoirs of his Life and Writings have been published by two of his friends, John Holland and James Everett. A tone of generous and enlightened morality pervades all the writings of this poet. He was the enemy of the slave-trade and of every form of oppression, and the warm friend of every scheme of philanthropy and improvement. The pious and devotional feelings displayed in his early effusions colour all his poetry. In description, however, he is not less happy; and in his 'Greenland' and 'Pelican Island' there are passages of great beauty, evincing a refined taste and judgment in the selection of his materials. His late works had more vigour and variety than those by which he first became distinguished. Indeed, his fame was long confined to what is termed the religious world, till he shewed, by his cultivation of different styles of poetry, that his depth and sincerity of feeling, the simplicity of his taste, and the picturesque beauty of his language, were not restricted to purely spiritual themes. His smaller poems enjoy a popularity almost equal to those of Moore, which, though differing widely

in subject, they resemble in their musical flow, and their compendious happy expression and imagery.

Greenland.
'Tis sunset; to the firmament serene
The Atlantic wave reflects a gorgeous scene;
Broad in the cloudless west, a belt of gold
Girds the blue hemisphere ; above unrolled
The keen clear air grows palpable to sight,
Embodied in a flush of crimson light,
Through which the evening-star, with milder gleam,
Descends to meet her image in the stream.
Far in the east, what spectacle unknown
Allures the eye to gaze on it alone?
Amidst black rocks, that lift on either hand
Their countless peaks, and mark receding land;
Amidst a tortuous labyrinth of seas,
That shine around the Arctic Cyclades;
Amidst a coast of dreariest continent,
In many a shapeless promontory rent;
O'er rocks, seas, islands, promontories spread,
The ice-blink rears its undulated head, (î)
On which the sun, beyond the horizon shrined,
Hath left his richest garniture behind;
Piled on a hundred arches, ridge by ridge,
O'er fixed and fluid strides the alpine bridge,
Whose blocks of sapphire seem to mortal eye
Hewn from cerulean quarries in the sky;
With glacier battlements that crowd the spheres,
The slow creation of six thousand years,
Amidst immensity it towers sublime,
Winter's eternal palace, built by Time:
All human structures by his touch are borne
Down to the dust, mountains themselves are word
With his light footsteps; here for ever grows,
Amid the region of unmelting snows,
A monument, where every flake that falls
Gives adamantine firmness to the walls.
The sun beholds no mirror in his race,
That shews a brighter image of his face:
The stars, in their nocturnal vigils, rest
Like signal-fires on its illumined crest;
The gliding moon around the ramparts wheels,
And all its magic lights and shades reveals :
Beneath, the tide with equal fury raves,
To undermine it through a thousand caves;
Rent from its roof, though thundering fragments oft
Plunge to the gulf, immovable aloft,
From age to age, in air, o'er sea, on land,
Its turrets heighten and its piers expand.

Hark! through the calm and silence of the scene,
Slow, solemn, sweet, with many a pause between,
Celestial music swells along the air!
No! 'tis the evening-hymn of praise and prayer
From yonder deck, where, on the stern retired,

Three humble voyagers, (1) with looks inspired,
And hearts enkindled with a holier flame.
Than ever lit to empire or to fame
Devoutly stand: their choral accents rise
On wings of harmony beyond the skies;
And, 'midst the songs that seraph-minstrels sing,
Day without night, to their immortal king
These simple strains, which erst Bohemian hills
Echoed to pathless woods and desert rills
Now heard from Shetland's azure bound-are known
In heaven; and He who sits upon the throne
In human form, with mediatorial power,
Remembers Calvary, and hails the hour
When, by the Almighty Father's high decree,
The utmost north to him shall bow the knee,
And, won by love, an untamed rebel race
Kiss the victorious sceptre of his grace.
Then to his eye, whose instant glance pervades
Heaven's heights, earth's circle, hell's profoundest shades,
Is there a group more lovely than those three
Night-watching pilgrims on the lonely sea ?
Or to his ear, that gathers, in one sound,
The voices of adoring worlds around,
Comes there a breath of more deligh il praise
Than the faint notes his poor disciples raise,
Ere on the treacherous main they sink to rest,
Secure as leaning on their Master's breast ?

They sleep; but memory wakes; and dreams array
Night in a iively masquerade of day ;
The land they seek, the land they leave behind,
Meet on mid-ocean in the plastic mind;
One brings forsaken home and friends so nigh,
That tears in slumber swell the unconscious eye:
The other opens, with prophetic view,
Perils which e'en their fathers never knew
(Though schooled by suffering, long inured to toil,
Outcasts and exiles from their natal soil);
Strange scenes, strange men; untold, untried distress;
Pain, hardships, famine, cold, and nakedness,
Diseases; death in every hideous form,
On shore, at sea, by fire, by flood, by storm;
Wild beasts, and wilder men—unmoved with fear,
Health, comfort, safety, life, they count not dear,
May they but hope a Saviour's love to shew,
And warn one spirit from eternal woe;
Nor will they faint, nor can they strive in vain,
Since thus to live is Christ, to die is gain.

'Tis morn: the bathing moon her lustre shrouds;
Wide o'er the east impends an arch of clouds
That spans the ocean ; while the infant dawn
Peeps through the portal o'er the liquid lawn
That ruffled by an April gale appears,
Between the gloom and splendour of the spheres,
Dark-purple as the moorland heath, when ram
Hangs in low vapours over the autumnal plain :
Till the full sun, resurgent from the flood,
Looks on the waves, and turns them into blood;
But quickly kindling, as his beams aspire,
The lambent billows play in forms of fire.

1 The first Christian missionaries to Greenland.

Where is the vessel ? Shining through the light,
Like the white sea-fowl's horizontal flight.
Yonder she wings, and skims, and cleaves her way
Through refluent foam and iridescent spray.

Night.
Night is the time for rest;

The full moon's earliest glance, How sweet, when labours close,

That brings into the home-sick mind To gather round an aching breast

All we have loved and left behind.
The curtain of repose,
Stretch the tired limbs, and lay the head Night is the time for care
Upon our own delightful bed!

Brooding on hours misspent,

To see the spectre of. despair Night is the time for dreams;

Come to our lonely tent; The gay romance of life,

Like Brutus. 'midst his slumbering host, When truth that is, and truth that scems, Summoned to die by Cæsar's ghost.

Blend in fantastic strife; Ah! visions less beguiling far

Night is the time to think; Than waking dreams by daylight are! Then from the eye the soul

Takes flight, and on the utmost brink Night is the time for toil;

Of yonder starry pole, To plough the classic field,

Discerns beyond the abyss of night
Intent to find the buried spoil

The dawn of uncreated light.
Its wealthy furrows yield;
Till all is ours that sages taught,

Night is the time to pray;
That poets sang or heroes wrought.

Our Saviour oft withdrew

To desert mountains far away ; Night is the time to weep;

So will his followers do; To wet with unseen tears

Steal from the throng to haunts untrod, Those graves of memory where sleep And commune there alone with God.

The joys of other years;
Hopes that were angels in their birth, Night is the time for death;
But perished young like things on earth! When all around is peace,

Calmly to yield the weary breath
Night is the time to watch;

From sin and suffering cease : On ocean's dark expanse

Think of heaven's bliss, and give the sign To hail the Pleiades, or catch

To parting friends, such death be mine!

The Pelican Island.
Light as a flake of foam upon the wind,
Keel-upward from the deep emerged a shell,
Shaped like the moon ere half her horn is filled :
Fraught with young life, it righted as it rose,
And moved at will along the yielding water.
The native pilot of this little bark
Put out a tier of oars on either side,
Spread to the wafting breeze a twofold sail,
And mounted up and glided down the billow
In happy freedom, pleased to feel the air,
And wander in the luxury of light.
Worth all the dead creation, in that hour,
To me appeared this lonely Nautilus,
My fellow-being, like myself alive.
Entranced in contemplation, vague yet sweet,
I watched its vagrant course and rippling wake,
Till I forgot the sun amidst the heavens.

It closed, sunk dwindled to a point, then nothing:
While the last bubble crowned the dimpling eddy
Through which mine eye still giddily pursued it,
A joyous creature vaulted through the air

The aspiring fish that fain would be a bird,
On long, light wings, that flung a diamond-shower
Of dew-drops round its evanescent form,
Sprang into light and instantly descended.
Ere I could greet the stranger as a friend,
Or mourn his quick departure, on the surge
A shoal of dolphins, tumbling in wild glee,
Glowed with such orient tinte, they might have been
The rainbow's offspring, when it met the ocean
In that resplendent vision I had seen.
While yet in ecstasy I hung o'er these,
With every motion pouring out fresh beanties,
As though the conscious colours came and went
At pleasure, glorying in their subtle changes-
Enormous o'er the flood, Leviathan
Looked forth, and from his roaring nostrils sent
Two fountains to the sky, then plunged amain
In headlong pastime through the closing gulf.

The Recluse.
A fountain issuing into light,

Its lovely links had power to bind Before a marble palace, threw

In welcome chains my wandering mind. To heaver its column, pure and bright,

Returning thence in showers of dew : So thonght I when I saw the face But soon a humbler course it took,

By happy portraiture revealed, And glid away a nameless brook.

Of one adorned with every grace,

Her name and date from me concealed, Flowers on its grassy margin sprang, But not her story; she had been

Flies o'er its eddying surface played; The pride of many a splendid scene. Birds 'midst the alder-branches sang, Flocks through the verdant meadows She cast her glory round a court, strayed;

And frolicked in the gayest ring, The weary there lay down to rest, . Where fashion's high-born minions sport And there the halcyon built her nest. Like sparkling fireflies on the wing;

But thence, when love had touched her 'Twas beautiful to stand and watch

soul,
The fountain's crystal turn to gems, To nature and to trath she stole,
And from the sky such colours catch
As if 'twere raining diadems;

From din, and pageantry, and strife, Yet all was cold and curious art.

'Midst woods and mountains, vales and That charmed the eye, but missed the

plains, heart.

She treads the paths of lowly life,

Yet in a bosom-circle reigns, Dearer to me the little stream,

No fountain scattering diamond-showWhose unimprisoned waters run,

ers, Wild as the changes of a dream, [sun: But the sweet streamlet watering flowers. By rock and glen, through shade and

Aspirations of Youth, Higher, higher, will we climb,

Onward ! onward, will we press
Up the mount of glory,

Through the path of duty;
That our names may live through time Virtue is true happiness,
In our country's story;

Excellence true beauty.
Happy, when her welfare calls,

Minds are of supernal birth, He who conquers, he who falls !

Let us make a heaven of earth.

Deeper, deeper, let us toil

In the mines of knowledge; Nature's wealth and learning's spoil,

Win from school and college: Delve we there for richer gems Than the stars of diadems.

Closer, closer, then we knit

Hearts and hands together,
Where our fireside comforts sit,

In the wildest weather ;
Oh, they wander wide who roam,
For the joys of life, from home.