We hunt your bondmen flying from slavery's hateful hell-
Our voices, at your bidding, take up the bloodhound's yell-
We gather at your summons above our fathers' graves,
From Freedom's holy altar-horns to tear your wretched slaves!

Thank God! not yet so vilely can Massachusetts bow,

The spirit of her early time is with her even now;

Dream not because her pilgrim blood moves slow, and calm, and cool, She thus can stoop her chainless neck, a sister's slave and tool!

All that a Sister State should be, all that a free State may,
Heart, hand and purse we proffer, as in our early day;

But that one dark lothsome burthen, ye must stagger with alone,
And reap the bitter harvest which ye yourselves have sown!

If slavery be a reproach, and too just a reproach it is to the Southern States, surely the citizens of New England may justly pride themselves upon the poetry which has arisen out of the sin and shame of their brethren. Time will inevitably chase away the crime, for national crimes are in their very nature transient, while the noble effusions that sprang from that foul source, whether in the verse of the poet, or the speeches of the orator, are imperishable.

Another of my sins of omission is Mr. Halleck, a poet of a different stamp, with less of earnestness and fire, but more of grace and melody. How musical are these stanzas on the Music of

Nature!

Young thoughts have music in them, love

And happiness their theme;

And music wanders in the wind

That lulls a morning dream.
And there are angel voices heard
In childhood's frolic hours,
When life is but an April day
Of sunshine and of flowers.

There's music in the forest leaves

When summer winds are there,

And in the laugh of forest girls
That braid their sunny hair.

The first wild bird, that drinks the dew
From violets of the spring,

Has music in his voice, and in

The fluttering of his wing.

Still better than these verses are the stanzas on the death of his brother poet Drake :

Green be the turf above thee,
Friend of my better days;
None knew thee but to love thee,
None named thee but to praise.

Tears fell when thou wert dying,
From eyes unused to weep;
And long where thou art lying
Will tears the cold turf steep.

When hearts whose truth was proven
Like thine are laid in earth,
There should a wreath be woven
To tell the world their worth;

And I, who woke each morrow
To clasp thy hand in mine,
Who shared thy joy and sorrow,
Whose weal and woe were thine,-

It should be mine to braid it

Around thy faded brow;

But I've in vain essayed it,
And feel I can not now.

While memory bids me weep thee
Nor thoughts nor words are free,
The grief is fixed too deeply

That mourns a man like thee.

This is a true and manly record of a true and manly friendship. There is no doubting the sorrow, honorable alike to the Departed and the Survivor. May he be so loved and so mourned !

XXVII.

VOLUMINOUS AUTHORS.

HARGRAVE'S STATE TRIALS.

ALL my life long I have delighted in voluminous works; in other words, I have delighted in that sort of detail which permits so intimate a familiarity with the subjects of which it treats. This fancy of mine seems most opposed to the spirit of an age fertile in abridgments and selections. And yet my taste is hardly, perhaps, so singular as it seems: witness the six volume biographies of Scott and Southey, which every body wishes as long again as they are; witness the voluminous histories of single events the Conquest of Peru and of Mexico, by Mr. Prescott, the French Revolution of M. Thiers, the Girondins of M. de Lamartine. Even the most successful writers of modern fiction have found the magical effects of bringing the public into intimacy with their heroes. Hence Mr. Cooper (dead I regret to say, but yet imperishably alive in his graphic novels), extended to fifteen volumes the adventures of Leather-Stocking, until every reader offered his hand to greet the honest backwoodsman as if he had been a daily visitor; and Balzac, a still greater artist, brought the same dramatis persona, the same set of walking ladies and gentlemen to fill up the background of his scenes of the "Life of Paris and of the Provinces," with an illusion so perfect and so masterly, that I myself, who ought to have some acquaintance with the artifices of story-telling, was so completely deceived as to inquire by letter of the friend who had introduced me to those remarkable books, whether the Horace Bianchon, whom I had just found consulted for the twentieth time in some grave malady, were a make-believe physician, or a real living man to which my friend, herself no novice in this sort of deception, replied that he was certainly a fictitious personage, for that she had written two years ago to Paris to ask the same question.

Even in this world of Beauties, and of Extracts, I do not believe myself quite alone in my love of the elaborate and the minute; and yet I doubt if many people contemplate very long very big books with the sense of coming enjoyment which such a prospect gives me; and few shrink, as I do, with aversion and horror from that invention of the enemy-an Abridgment. I never shall forget the shock I experienced in seeing Bruce, that opprobrium of an unbelieving age, that great and graphic traveler, whose eight or nine goodly volumes took such possession of me, that I named a whole colony of bantams after his Abyssinian princes and princesses, calling a little golden strutter of a cock after that arch-tyrant the Ras Michael, and a speckled hen, the beauty of the poultry-yard, Ozoro Esther, in honor of the Ras's favorite wife-I never felt greater disgust than at seeing this magnificent work cut down to a thick, dumpy volume, seven inches by five; except, perhaps, when I happened to light upon another pet book-Drinkwater's "Siege of Gibraltar," where I had first learned to tremble at the grim realities of war, had watched day by day the firing of the red-hot balls, had groped my way through the galleries, and taken refuge in the casemates, degraded from the fair proportions of a goodly quarto, into the thin and meager pamphlet of a lending library, losing a portion of its life-like truth with every page that was cut away.

Besides books long in themselves, I love large collections of works, of the same class. Shakspeare I had always known, of course. But what joy it was to wander at will through the vellum bound folio of Beaumont and Fletcher, and then to diverge to Ben Jonson, to Massinger, to Ford, to Webster, to the countless riches of Dodsley's Old Plays! How pleasant to get together books united only by a common subject, collections of English ballads, Percy, Weber, Heber, Ritson, Scott, the Chronicles of Froissart and de Joinville, of Hollinshed and of Hall, the endless Memoirs of Louis the Fourteenth's day, or the still more endless Journals and Diaries, whether by prince or valet, whether false or true, that show us vividly as in life him whom Beranger has called "the great poet of modern times," the marvelous Napoleon!

Or again, books by the same author: the novels of Richardson; the letters of Walpole-will they ever come to an end? I hope not. The majestic verse and graceful prose of Dryden,