TO THE GREEK VALERIAN;

OR, LADDER TO HEAVEN.

Addressed to ELIZABETH B. BARRETT, on the inadequate notice of her Poems in the last Number of the Quarterly Review.*

I.

FLOWER of the Soul! emblem of sentient Thoughts,
With prayer on prayer to chorded harps ascending,
Till at the clouded Portals, humbly bending,
They, like the holy martyrs' pale cohorts,

Wait solemnly-while sounds of dew descending
Their presence recognise, approve, and bless; -
Flower! shedding fragrance from a dark recess,
Thy roots lie passive on this mortal soil;
Thy beauty blooms on high

serene beyond our coil!

II.

Only the spirits, in their rapt devotion,

Of those who measure not what God has given;
But cast their naked hearts into the ocean;

Who cling to every thought that soars for heaven;
Who struggle not against the eternal motion.
Which from the centre of all-being springs,
And of the Cross and Passion ever sings,

In earth's most various tones; while faith still brings
All discords tow'rds one harmony for man;
These, only, hear such hymns—as thine, Valerian!

R. H. H.

THE SAD LOVER TO HIS FLOWER.

WITH thee, fair flower, I may not part,
To have thee placed within the zone
Encircling an angel heart,

To fade away, as I have done.

I'll place thee near that cheek's fair side,
Perchance to catch one falling tear,
In pity to the woes I bear,-
The love I cannot hide.

Torn by the hand of sorrow, pale,
From the warm aspect of the south,
Should now thy dying leaves inhale
The treasures of her gem-like mouth.

Regret not that thy little span
Is shorten'd by unsparing man :'
Few hours, and autumn's winds had strewn
Thy leaves among the chilly dew;
And, dying, thou wouldst ne'er have known
The sigh compassion drew.
No tear had thy last glow received,

A tear by conscience unreproved, }
In pity to a heart bereaved,
Not wholly unbeloved.

P. N. T.

• Inadequate, except in conferring upon her the above most appropriate title.

THE

MONTHLY CHRONICLE.

A CHRISTMAS GOSSIP ABOUT NEW BOOKS. RIVERS! Rivers! Rivers! What volumes upon volumes might be written. upon rivers without running the smallest risk of exhausting the subject. First, there is the picturesque variety which belongs more or less to every stream, from the Hudson to the Wandle - now buried in shadow, now glittering in sunshine, now brawling over ruined trunks and fragments of rock, now fast asleep in its low basins where hardly a breath of air creeps over the surface, and now pouring its broad tide into the ocean where it vanishes like a flood of light; second, there is the immediate scenery on the banks, which is different from all other scenery, being naturally or artificially distributed so as to catch and present the most remarkable points of beauty, villas and cottages, sometimes peeping through a cloud of foliage, sometimes retreating behind a gentle undulation of green sward, and sometimes covered up in woods, and indicated merely by tiny wreaths of smoke delicately feathering the tree-tops, and melting off into the blue atmosphere. Then there are the traditions of the rivers! Think, imaginative reader, of the Rhine, the Rhone, and the Guadalquiver - with what legends their heights are crowned what freights of chivalry they have carried on their waters what music and poetry danced on their waves what historians flourished and perished on their margins and what memories, tragical and mirthful, of human lives wasted away in tears, or garnered up in sweet sympathies of old customs dimly surviving in way-side relics, or haunted ruins of lords and ladies, and country manners and country houses and the minstrels, and trobadours, and minnesingers, and pilgrims of an antiquity full of faith and goodness. Then to what uses all these currents, with their mineral riches, have been turned - what plains they have fertilised - what cities they have succoured what treasures they have yielded and now, after ages of floods, and earthquakes, and droughts, they still continue to flow on as freshly as if they were loosened only yesterday from their fountains. But one might moralise upon them to the end of one's life, and never get to the end of their suggestions. Let us then descend from the lofty summits of "this great argument," and keep upon the banks of a single river - one of the noblest in the world our own sylvan Thames.

Mr. Mackay has chronicled the Thames and its tributaries in a work1 full of the best kind of poetry, of earnest appreciation of the Truthful and the Beautiful, and a loving trust in Nature. Wisely has he selected this royal stream for a pilgrimage of research, and religiously has he fulfilled his undertaking. The Thames is neither so historical as the Rhine, nor so picturesque as the Danube; but we assert with confidence that its associations with poetry and poets, art and artists, and all classes of literature,

1 The Thames and its Tributaries; or Rambles among the Rivers. By CHARLES MACKAY, Author of the "Hope of the World," &c. Two Vols. London Richard Bentley. 1840.

are more numerous than can be catalogued on behalf of any dozen rivers in Europe. It must be allowed at once that it never reaches the grandeur of the mighty German waters, and that it is no where consecrated by legends of equal interest; but is there a stream in the whole world, pastoral and simple as it is, hallowed by such a throng of glorious personal memories? Not one. You shall travel from one end of Europe to the other, and bring back from its rivers fewer reminiscences of this description than we can gather upon the banks of Father Thames alone.

Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Webster, Marlowe, and the whole of that immortal band of dramatists reaped their laurels on the very edge of the stream. On the bank-side stood the theatres of the Globe, the Rose, the Hope, and the Swan, the Bear Garden, and the Paris Garden, at which latter place Ben Jonson is reproached by Decker for having played. That is something striking to begin with. Then what a bustle of palaces formerly graced the margin of the river in the very depths of Westminster and the City - what scenes passed at the Temple and in old Southwark, and in the sacred region of Alsatia. Farther westward, leaving Milton behind us in Bread Street, and Spenser in Westminster, and the poets and dramatists of Charles II.'s time, and the Knights Templars in Fleet Street, towards Wandsworth, Putney, Hammersmith, Kew, Richmond, and Twickenham, we sail amidst the birthplaces, residences, and graves of poets, and artists, and men of letters. The Walpoles at Strawberry Hill - Cowley at Chertsey, and his friend the indulging archdeacon Pope and Lady Mary Thomson and Denham, Loutherbourg and Hogarth (whose monument is to be seen in the little churchyard of Chiswick, with an inscription written by David Garrick, who lived and died on the Adelphi Terrace looking upon the river) - Ugo Foscolo (also buried in Chiswick, close beside one of the daughters of Oliver Cromwell, the Duchess of Cleveland, and Sir James Thornhill, with whose name the Thames is associated both here and at Greenwich, where he executed the famous painted hall) — Charles James Fox and George Canning, both of whom, by a strange coincidence, died in the Duke of Devonshire's houseJean Jacques Rousseau, who during a part of his residence in England lived in the house of a baker in Turnham Green - Joe Miller, the veritable jester, who lived under the shadow of the duke's walls-Dee, the rosicrucian, whose life is as good as an Arabian tale - Gay, and Mallet, and Swift and — Arbuthnot, and Surrey, and Chaucer and Wolsey, in all his magnificence at Esher - the Herschels at Slough - Edmund Waller and Edmund Burke at Beaconsfield and so on to Oxford, every step brightened by similar associations—not to say a word about the river downwards from London — the Isle of Dogs - Tilbury Fort- Chatham - Rochester - the old navigators and adventurers, Frobisher, Gilbert, Raleigh, and the rest whose ships passed under the eyes of Elizabeth as she stood in the windows of her palace at Greenwich (when Frobisher was under sail for his second expedition in search of a north-west passage, her Majesty, we are told, approached the window, and waived her hand to him in token of encouragement) Drake, knighted in the river on board his own vessel by the queen in person-John Evelyn, who dwelt at Saye's Court, beautified by his love of trees, and afterwards disfigured for the accommodation of Peter the Great — the Earl of Chatham, who lived at Haye's Place - the Rye-house, celebrated as the scene of that plot which led to the martyrdom of Sydney and Russell and a thousand other localities peopled with individual recollections embalmed in the loving memory of England. Mr. Mackay unlocks all these treasures with the air of an enchanter, who has only to lift his wand and make the earth surrender up its mysteries. He carries us pleasantly along

with him through towns, villages, and hamlets, over old bridges and under ancient gateways, into castles, and convents, and cottages, bringing before us the worthies of other times in their habits as they lived, showing us their homesteads and their kindred, giving us glimpses of their characters and their works, and pointing out along the entire course of the stream, from its spring to its embouchure, every nook and corner memorable for the accidents of genius or of history. And all this is done without the least display of pedantry or affectation of any kind. We come upon each new view as easily as if we were floating with the tide, and the trees opened upon us at either side and showed us the grotto at Twickenham, or Cowley in his garden at Chertsey, or Martha Blount pondering up the terrace at a distance, while Pope was dying in his chair, or Horace Walpole on an ottoman dictating the "Castle of Otranto." The work is written in a most cordial spirit; is replete with the most agreeable sort of literary information; and while it frequently kindles into a vein of poetical enthusiasm, never gets out of that lively, natural, and social tone of fire-side gossip which renders such revelations at once familiar and impressive. The charm of the book is greatly increased by a multitude of choice little wood-cuts that constantly interrupt the text just at the moments when the writer happens to be speaking of the places they represent; and they have such an air of reality and beauty that they seem to run up, like magic, out of the stream, exactly at the right spots to surprise the imagination into remote visions of their storied neighbourhoods.

While we are thinking of rivers, and all the delights and reverential matters connected with them, we must not forget the pleasures of angling. There is a cant abroad upon this subject, which every body who is really in earnest in his feelings would do well to discourage. Dr. Johnson's dictum has long since been exploded, for wiser men than himself have borne the rod; but some people, in the expectation of getting credit sideways for tenderness and sensibility, affect to chide the angler on the score of crueltyprecisely as if the pangs of the fish administered to his entertainment, and as if he played the salmon or the trout with exquisite craft for the sake of prolonging the pain of the captive. People who talk in this way may be set down at once as persons who desire to be thought very humane at the smallest possible expenditure of actual sympathy; and if the truth could be ascertained concerning them, it might be found that they were composed of a bundle of antipathies and moral perplexities, which prevent them from penetrating the core of any problem submitted to their reason, and keep them for ever hovering on the confines of an uneasy scepticism. It is in large things as it is in small, and the man who stops short at a half faith in the one is not very likely to have resolution enough to advance much farther in the other. We should like to ask some of these people whether they have any objection to eat fish, and to take oil with it, and other luxurious accompaniments? Yet the fish and the oil, too, are the products of systematic pain. Do they object to eat beef or mutton, or white veal (a delicacy literally created out of protracted agony), or turtle (which passes into soup through a lingering misery we should be sorry any of its consumers were obliged to endure even in their dreams), or crimped cod, or eels, in both of which cases the preparatory tortures of the cuisine are inflicted on the living fish? What is their sentimentality on the subject worth, then, if they condemn the angler, and feast upon the spoils of his net? We know that all this is not an argument in defence of angling, nor do we design it in that sense: but it is a conclusive answer to the false argument against angling, and in that sense we hope it will be intelligible. When these people agree to give

up feasting on fish, and birds, and animal food, we shall admit their right to protest against angling, shooting, hunting, and not only all the sports of the fields, the winds, and the waters, but all the processes by which provisions are obtained and prepared for the use of man. But until they abandon their habits of living, they are no more justified in condemning the angler, than a man who had just purchased some stolen property would be in reproaching the thief. It seems to be a law of nature as well of necessity, to convert the lower animals to our use. The same principle is clearly enunciated through all the orders of the creation; the kite preys on the dove, the tiger on the lesser creatures of the forest, and fish, birds, and insects, live in a condition of perpetual warfare. It is apparently essential to the ends of creation, that this law should be actively carried out, or the earth would be overrun with those races that outstrip the rest in fecundity, and man would at last perish from the face of the soil in the pressure of existence around him. The structure of the various animals places beyond all doubt the functions they were destined to fufil. Some are framed for one species of prey, some for another - some with strong scent, some with acute hearing, some with surpassing fleetness - some with ponderous strength, some with extraordinary agility, some with slow and almost torpid perceptions some to cleave the clouds, some to burrow the earth, some to explore the waters some with their organs of hearing thrown in front to enable them to pursue the sound of the flying game, others with the same organs thrown back to enable them to catch the sound of their pursuers, and others with flexible ears to act either way according to circumstances. The whole scheme of the universe harmonises with this great necessity of life; and consequently the objections urged against the angler are as unphilosophical in the one point of view, as they are inconsistent and pitiful in the other.

Who that is an angler, is not also a lover of Nature? Can he go abroad into pastures, and creep into the green places under the trees, and watch the ripples of the stream at his feet, without feeling his heart subdued by sensations of tranquil gratitude? Old Isaac, the prince of anglers, was thus moulded into a poet. "Turn out of the way a little," he says, "good scholar, towards yonder high honey-suckle hedge; there we'll sit and sing, whilst this shower falls so gently upon the teeming earth, and gives yet a sweeter smell to the lovely flowers that adorn these verdant meadows. Look! under that broad beach tree I sat down when I was last this way a fishing; and the birds in the adjoining grove seemed to have a friendly contention with an echo, whose dead voice seemed to live in a hollow tree, near to the brow of that primrose hill; there I sat, viewing the silver streams glide silently towards their centre - the tempestuous sea - yet sometimes opposed by rugged roots and pebble stones, which broke their waves, and turned them into foam; and sometimes I beguiled time by viewing the harmless lambs, some leaping securely in the cool shade, whilst others sported themselves in the cheerful sun; and saw others craving comfort from the woollen udders of their bleating dams. As I thus sat, these and other sights had so fully possessed my soul with content, that I thought, as the poet has happily expressed it,

'I was for that time lifted above earth,

And possest joys not promised at my birth.""

Here is a picture of an angler, which is true of all anglers! He is carried away by the sights and sounds around him into contemplations that lift him above the earth; his spirit is drawn upwards; and his soul, full of sweet content, is poured out in lowly thanksgivings!