tomb! So Tibni died, says the sacred historian, with inimitable simplicity, and Omri reigned. He who makes the care of his eternal interests his chief pursuit is exposed to no such perils and vicissitudes. His hopes will be infallibly crowned with success. The soil on which he bestows his labor will infinitely more than recompense his care; and, however disproportioned the extent and duration of his efforts to the magnitude of their object, however insufficient to secure it by their intrinsic vigor, the faithfulness of God is pledged to bring them to a prosperous issue.

WILLIAM

ROBERT SPENCER.

The Hon. William Robert Spencer, born in 1770, was the grandson of Charles, the sec ond Duke of Marlborough. He was the author of some spirited translations and of some ballads. The composition that follows has been so much admired that it has appeared in nearly every collection made since it was written. The little that is known of the author is not much to his credit. He died at Paris in 1834

BETH GELERT, OR THE GRAVE OF THE GREYHOUND.

That day Llewelyn little loved

The chase of hart and hare;
And scant and small the booty proved,
For Gêlert was not there.

THE spearmen heard the bugle sound,
And cheerily smiled the morn,

And many a brach and many a hound
Obeyed Llewelyn's horn.

WILLIAM ROBERT SPENCER.

He called his child; no voice replied;
He searched with terror wild;
Blood, blood, he found on every side,
But nowhere found his child.

His suppliant looks, as prone he fell,
No pity could impart ;
But still his Gêlert's dying yell
Passed heavy o'er his heart.

"Hell-hound, my child's by thee devoured," Vain, vain was all Llewelyn's woe; The frantic father cried,

And to the hit his vengeful sword

He plunged in Gêlert's side.

Aroused by Gêlert's dying yell,

Some slumberer wakened nigh:
What words the parent's joy could tell
To hear his infant's cry!

Concealed beneath a tumbled heap
His hurried search had missed,
All glowing from his rosy sleep,
The cherub boy he kissed.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. 269

Ah, what was then Llewelyn's pain!
For now the truth was clear:
His gallant hound the wolf had slain
To save Llewelyn's heir.

Nor scathe had he, nor harm, nor dread,
But, the same couch beneath,

Lay a gaunt wolf, all torn and dead,
Tremendous still in death.

"Best of thy kind, adieu;

The frantic blow which laid thee low
This heart shall ever rue."

And now a gallant tomb they raise,
With costly sculpture decked,
And marbles storied with his praise
Poor Gêlert's bones protect.

1

There never could the spearman pass,
Or forester, unmoved;
There oft the tear-besprinkled grass
Llewelyn's sorrow proved.

And there he hung his horn and spear,
And there, as evening fell,

In fancy's ear he oft would hear
Poor Gêlert's dying yell.

And, till great Snowdon's rocks grow old,
And cease the storm to brave,
The consecrated spot shall hold
The name of "Gêlert's Grave."

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

William Wordsworth was born in Cumberland in 1770. He was sent to Cambridge by his uncles in 1787, where he studied the classics and the Italian language, and read what his fancy chose; but as he neglected mathematics, his rank was not high. He did not incline either to the church or the bar, but determined to make his slender patrimony last till the public should acknowledge his merits as a poet. In youth he was a furious republican, approving even of the French Revolution; in his age he opposed every just measure of political reform in his own country—a striking illustration of Emerson's saying, that "a conservative is a radical gone to seed." During the poet's long life he had changed his residence several times, but he settled at last in the place with which his name is now forever connected - Rydal Mount. His sister Dora was his constant companion, the complement of his nature, and more truly poetical in feeling than he. Without her his verses would probably have been still more like the burlesque in Smith's Rejected Addresses:

"My brother Jack was nine in May,

And I was eight on New-Year's day," &c., &c.

Doubtless there is a poetry as well as a beauty in common things; but the early theory and practice of Wordsworth would make no distinction between a village gala day and an oldwife's washing day, between Bonaparte after Waterloo, with a continent lost, and a fisherman with a broken net or a swamped boat. That Wordsworth came to greatness was not by following to absurdity his early notions, but by preserving his severe simplicity of style,

while he raised his eyes to higher ideal subjects, and by rejecting, as unworthy of the muse, the mean and trivial affairs which all people know and experience, but do not care to see set down, with or without rhyme.

The friendship of our author for Coleridge and Southey forms a prominent feature in his life, for which the biographies must be consulted. He was happily married, and it was to his wife, after three years, that he addressed the charming little poem,

"She was a phantom of delight," &c.

He died in his eightieth year, having passed a serene and honored old age. It is too soon, perhaps, to say what is to be his place among poets. For many of the minor poems we can predict the affectionate regard of generations. In proportion as readers attain to a certain spiritual height, their admiration for Wordsworth as a philosophic poet must increase. We doubt whether his longer poems, especially The Excursion, which, as Lord Byron says, is"Writ in a manner that is my aversion,"

deserve to be or ever will be popular. The poet has been too impartial: like the sun, he gilds a cow-shed as soon as a palace; whereas the function of the writer, according to Em erson, is to select the "eminent and characteristic experiences."

Wordsworth's complete poems, in seven volumes, are included in the Pickering edition.

ODE.

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD.

The child is father of the man ;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

I.

THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;

Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

II.

The rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the rose,

The moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare ;

Waters, on a starry night,

Are beautiful and fair;

The sunshine is a glorious birth;

But yet I know, where'er I go,

That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.

V.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us -our life's star-
Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar,
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy;
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy;

But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy ;

The youth who daily farther from the east
Must travel still is nature's priest.
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;

At length the man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

VI.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own; Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind, And, even with something of a mother's mind, And no unworthy aim,

The homely nurse doth all she can To make her foster-child, her inmate man, Forget the glories he hath known, And that imperial palace whence he came.

IX.

O, joy! that in our embers

Is something that doth live,

That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive.

The thought of our past years in me doth breed

Perpetual benediction: not, indeed,

For that which is most worthy to be blest,
Delight and liberty, the simple creed

Of childhood, whether busy or at rest,

With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast; Not for thee I raise

The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
High instincts before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence; truths that wake
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,
Nor man nor boy,

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy.

Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,

Can in a moment travel thither, And see the children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

XI.

And O, ye fountains, meadows, hills, and groves,
Forbode not any severing of our loves;
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might.

I only have relinquished one delight,
To live beneath your more habitual sway.

I loved the brooks which down their channels fret Even more than when I tripped lightly as they; The innocent brightness of a new-born day

Is lovely yet.