Course one another o'er thy silver bosom : And yet thy flowing is through fields of blood, And armed men their hot and weary brows Slake with thy limpid and perennial coolness. Even with such rare and singular purity Mov'st thou, oh Miriam, in yon cruel city. Men's eyes, o'erwearied with the sights of war, With tumult and with grief, repose on thee More lovely than the light of star or moon, Oh! how dost thou, beloved proselyte To the high creed of him who died for men, Oh! how dost thou commend the truths I teach thee, By the strong faith and soft humility Wherewith thy soul embraces them! Thou prayest, And I, who pray with thee, feel my words wing'd, And holier fervor gushing from my heart, While heaven seems smiling kind acceptance down On the associate of so pure a worshipper. But ah! why com'st thou not? these two long nights I've watch'd for thee in vain, and have not felt The music of thy footsteps on my spirit (Voice at a distance.)-Javan ! Jav. It is her voice! the air is fond of it, And enviously delays its tender sounds From the ear that thirsteth for themMiriam ! ``granate, The skin all rosy with the emprisoned wine; All I can bear thee, more than thou canst bear Home to the city. Mir. Bless thee! Oh my father! How will thy famish'd and thy toil-bow'd frame Resume its native majesty! thy words, When this bright draught hath slak'd thy parched lips, Flow with their wonted freedom and command. Jav. Thy father! still no thought but of thy father! Nay, Miriam! but thou must hear me now, Now ere we part-if we must part again, If my sad spirit must be rent from thine. Even now our city trembles on the verge conquers, Let Gischala, let fallen Jotapata From mine own heart, my life-blood's dearest drops) They slew them, Miriam, at the mother's breast, The smiling infants ;-and the tender maid, The soft, the loving, and the chaste, like thee, They slew her not till Mir. Javan, 'tis unkind! I have enough at home of thoughts like these, Thoughts horrible, that freeze the blood, and make A heavier burthen of this weary life. I hop'd with thee t' have pass'd a tranquil hour! A brief, a hurried, yet still tranquil hour! But thou art like them all! the miserable Have only Heaven, where they can rest in peace, Without being mock'd and taunted with their misery. Jav. Thou know'st it is a lover's wayward joy To be reproach'd by her he loves, or thus Thou would'st not speak. On her return, the maiden sings a hymn, of which the following beautiful verses form a part. They scarcely shrink from a comparison with the divine Christmas hymn of Miltonthe lovely melody of which, indeed, has evidently been on the ear of the author. For thou wert born of woman! thou didst To lay their gold and odours sweet Before thy infant feet. The Earth and Ocean were not hush'd to hear Bright harmony from every starry sphere; clouds along. One angel troop the strain began, And when thou didst depart, no car of To bear thee hence in lambent radiance came ; Nor visible Angels mourn'd with droop- Nor didst thou mount on high With all thine own redeem'd out bursting For thou didst bear away from earth Nor o'er thy cross the clouds of vengeance A little while the conscious earth did shake as it binds together the whole series of events, and places the reader in the best position to survey the impending burst of ruin. The chamber of Amariah is disturbed immediately afterwards, by the alarm that the Romans have forced the wall, and that the temThe bridegroom rushes forth;-havple is wrapped in unquenchable flames. ing ascertained the measure of the calamity, he returns only to bury his sword in the bosom of his bride, as her sole protection from "the Gentile ravisher," and to wash away the pain of the wound with his last burning tears. Salone comes out in her nuptial veil, and dies in the arms of Miriam in the porch; and ere long the light of the conflagration shews the halfarmed body of her husband stretched bloody by her side. At the moment when nothing seems to be reserved to save the Christian maiden from the common ruin, a Gentile soldier approaches her with a demeanour of unexpected gentleness, and in silence constrains her to follow him. He leads her, half unconscious whither she is going, over the burning frag At that foul deed by her fierce children done; ments of the city on to the rampart, A few dim hours of day The world in darkness lay; While thou didst sleep within the tomb, Ere yet the white-robed Angel shone And when thou didst arise, thou didst not With Devastation in thy red right hand, ful few. Then calmly, slowly didst thou rise Thy human form dissolved on high and thence down the path, with Mir. Here, here-not here-oh! any Not toward the fountain, not by this lone path. If thou wilt bear me hence, I'll kiss thy feet, Upon thy head. Thou hast hurried me along, ruin, And yet there seem'd a soft solicitude, Oh, strangely cruel! Lay in its slumber on the slumbering foun Ah! tain ? where art thou, thou that wert ever with me, Oh Javan! Javan! The Soldier. When was Javan call'd By Miriam, that Javan answer'd not? Forgive me all thy tears, thy agonies. Mir. What's here? The sad, the desolate, the sinful earth. Jav. 'Tis not now the first time, Miriam, But to thank rightly our Deliverer, We must know all the extent of his deliver ance. Mir. And I can only weep! Jav. Ay, thou should'st weep, Lost Zion's daughter. Mir. Ah! I thought not then Of my dead sister, and my captive father Said they not" captive" as we pass'd?-I thought not Of Zion's ruin and the Temple's waste. Javan. My own beloved! I dare call thee mine, For Heaven hath given thee to me-chosen out, As we two are, for solitary blessing, Even so shall perish, In its own ashes, a more glorious Temple, Yea, God's own architecture, this vast world, This fated universe-the same destroyer, The same destruction Earth, Earth, Earth, behold! And in that judgment look upon thine own! The Christian spectators then sing together the following sublime chorus, which, as we have hinted before, completes, in the most felicitous manner, the whole of the tragic picture, by extending the interest of the catastrophe, and carrying on the mind of the reader to the contemplation of the greatAs a specimen of composition, it is, er catastrophe which it symbolizes. we think, superior to any thing Mr Milman ever has produced, and indeed inferior in very little to any thing we remember in the poetry either of his English or of his German contemporaries. When taken together with cannot fail to impress our readers with the passages we have already quoted, it this youthful poet, and to fill them a high sense of the native power of with the brightest hopes concerning what he may hereafter aspire and dare to execute. HYMN. Even thus amid thy pride and luxury, Oh Earth! shall that last coming burst on thee, That secret coming of the Son of Man. When all the cherub-throning clouds shall shine, Irradiate with his bright advancing sign: When that Great Husbandman shall wave his fan, Sweeping, like chaff, thy wealth and pomp away: Still to the noontide of that nightless day, Shalt thou thy wonted dissolute course maintain. Along the busy mart and crowded street, The buyer and the seller still shall meet, And marriage feasts begin their jocund strain: Still to the pouring out the Cup of Woe; Till Earth, a drunkard, reeling to and fro, And mountains molten by his burning feet, And Heaven his presence own, all red with furnace heat. The hundred-gated Cities then, The Towers and Temples, nam'd of men Eternal, and the Thrones of Kings; The gilded summer Palaces, The courtly bowers of love and ease, Where still the Bird of pleasure sings: Ask ye the destiny of them? Go gaze on fallen Jerusalem! Yea, mightier names are in the fatal roll, 'Gainst earth and heaven God's standard is unfurl'd, The skies are shrivell'd like a burning scroll, And one vast common doom ensepulchres the world. Oh! who shall then survive? In the sky's azure canopy; Is but a fiery deluge without shore, Lord of all power, when thou art there alone doom: darkest womb, Yes, 'mid yon angry and destroying signs, O'er us the rainbow of thy mercy shines, We hail, we bless the covenant of its beam, Almighty to avenge, Almightiest to redeem! Such is the conclusion of the Fall flight that Mr Milman has ever hithof Jerusalem-by far the most soaring erto sustained. As a master of the high, serene, antique flow of lyrical declamation, we are free to say, that we consider him as far superior to any his past experience, by devoting himliving poet; and he should profit by self more to the rare path in which nature seems to have offered him success so pre-eminent. With regard to the drama, much as we admire Mr Milman's genius, we cannot say that we entertain for him any so very sanguine expectations. He is a poet highly refined, and sometimes his conceptions are profound; but he has not as yet exhibited any proof of that noble reliance on the simplicity of natural associations, without which we cannot hope to see the slumbering spirit of the British stage bidden from of his dialogue, the language is rather its lethargy. Throughout the whole elaborately poetical, and artificially moulded, than inspired by the immediate feelings and impulses of the passing scene. To qualify, in some measure, these remarks, it should, however, be held in remembrance, that the sacredness and dignity of the subject may perhaps have acted, in the present instance, as a species of more than common restraint on the more of his language. With every flow of the poet's imagination-still deduction the rigour of criticism can make, there still remains abundance of praise, which no one can refuse to this performance. The highest compliment to the genius of the author is to be found, not in the admiration excited by any particular passage, but in the deep gravity and grandeur of the impression which the whole tenor of the poem is calculated to produce. The Terror and the Pity which agitate the mind throughout the earlier parts of the drama are subdued and softened, in the closing scene, into a profound repose of humility and Christian confidence; and he that lays down the volume will confess, that Mr Milman has, in the first fruits of his genius, offered a noble sacrifice at the altar to whose service he has devoted his life. R TALES OF THE CLOISTER. MR NORTH, FROM the perusal of "the Monastery," and the gratifying annunciation of an approaching sequel, under the title of "the Abbot," I was lately induced to turn back to a collection of Catholic legends already introduced to your notice-the "Prato Fiorito di varj Esempj"-and have found it to contain (as might be expected) a great number of stories relative to the different monastic orders, calculated not more for the edification of pious believers, than for the amusement of such infidels as may chance to have enrolled themselves among the "lovers of hoar antiquity," to whom, and to yourself, I shall make no apology for thus briefly introducing a few specimens to their notice. TALE THE FIRST. Of the terrible chance that befell one who, with evil design, took upon himself the religious habit." Marianus, in his Chronicle of the Minorites, relates of a certain sorry and wicked person, whom we shall name Bernardin, that, after having consumed his substance, and wasted the better years of his life in vain and riotous living, immersed in sin and iniquity, under the guidance of his sovereign lord and master the devil, he was at length induced, by the suggestions of the same terrible potentate, to seek admission into the order of minor friars, for the express purpose of disturbing the peace and contaminating the morals of that holy brotherhood. With this view he addressed himself to St Anthony, who was then preaching at Padua, and who, having examined him touching his pretensions, and finding him (as he thought) sufficiently apt for the sacred func tions of the profession, received him accordingly, and afterwards perceiving him to have some knowledge of human sciences, constituted him a clerk, and took upon himself the charge of preparing him, by his efficacious instruc tion and exhortation, to become a shining light among those of the order to which he had thus been admitted. Bernardin, on his part, pushed his dissimulation to the utmost extremity, in the semblance of devout humility with which he listened to the saint's teaching, while he secretly plotted the destruction of that religion to which he appeared to be so zealous a convert; but Satan, whose jealousy is ever awake, and who began to entertain serious apprehensions lest the lessons to which he was a daily listener might, in the end, prevail with him to become a practiser also, began to devise means to secure his allegiance, or at least to deprive St Anthony of the glory of a conquest, by cutting short the days of the sinner before he should have lived to extricate himself from the toils of hell, in which he had hitherto remained a willing captive. He, therefore, infused into his ears a beginning fastidiousness of the religious life to which he had addicted himself, and a contempt of the instructions to which he had listened till he had almost yielded to the conviction they were calculated to produce; and, having thus infected his mind with the desire of change, he at last appeared before him one day in the likeness of a beautiful horse, ornamented with the fairest trappings, and furnished with every accoutrement necessary to the equipment of an honourable cavalier, which, when the false novice saw, as he issued forth from his cell to cross a meadow that lay between it and the refectory of his monastery, he cast thereon an admiring and covetous eye, accounting it the best and most gallant steed that it had ever fallen to his lot to behold. Accordingly, finding himself alone and unobserved, he went up to the noble animal and began to caress him, from whence he fell to examine his harness and accoutrements, when, in a portmanteau which was appended to the saddle, he discovered a complete suit of armour, with rich vestments, suited to a person of honour-and hard by a purse full of golden coin. Bernardin marvelled greatly at the sight, and began to conjecture who might be the fortunate possessor of such treasure, whom he imagined, without doubt, to be some one among the honourable knights of the vicinage. He did not, however, stop long in thinking about it, but soon threw off the religious |