The might of earthly love.

And bid me not depart,' she cried,

My Rudolph, say not so!

This is no time to quit thy side;

Peace, peace, I cannot go.

Hath the world aught for me to fear

When death is on thy brow?

The world! what means it ?-mine is here

I will not leave thee now.

I have been with thee in thine hour

Of glory and of bliss ;

Doubt not its memory's living power

To strengthen me through this!

And thou, mine honour'd love and true,
Bear on, bear nobly on!

We have the blessed Heaven in view,
Whose rest shall soon be won.'

And were not these high words to flow
From woman's breaking heart?
Through all that night of bitterest woe
She bore her lofty part;

But oh! with such a glazing eye,
With such a curdling cheek-

Love, love! of mortal agony,

Thou, only thou shouldst speak!

The wind rose high,-but with it rose
Her voice, that he might hear:

Perchance that dark hour brought repose
To happy bosoms near,

While she sat striving with despair

Beside his tortured form,

And pouring her deep soul in prayer
Forth on the rushing storm.

She wiped the death-damps from his brow,
With her pale hands and soft,

Whose touch upon the lute-chords low
Had still'd his heart so oft.

She spread her mantle o'er his breast,
She bathed his lips with dew,

And on his cheek such kisses press'd

As hope and joy ne'er knew.

Oh! lovely are ye, Love and Faith,
Enduring to the last!

She had her meed-one smile in death

And his worn spirit pass'd.

While ev'n as o'er a martyr's grave

She knelt on that sad spot,

And, weeping, bless'd the God who gave

Strength to forsake it not !"

Many of the poems in this volume have appeared in print before; but it is a pleasure to possess them in a collected state. They will, we venture to affirm, increase in public estimation the more and oftener they are perused. Among the shorter pieces in the last half of the volume, "The Last Wish" is peculiarly touching and sweet.

We have not space to extract more.

This volume will recommend itself far better than we can do it. The public taste, if, as some contend, it be vitiated, has enough left in it of what is discerning to relish the simplicity and beauty of Mrs. Hemans's verse, and we confidently leave her "Records of Woman" to its adjudication.

Dutch Epic.

CAVEAT EMPTOR! This is the age of fraud, imposture, substitution, transmutation, adulteration, abomination, contamination, and many others of the same sinister ending, always excepting purification. Every thing is debased and sophisticated, and "nothing is but what is not. All things are mixed, lowered, debased, deteriorated by our cozening dealers and shopkeepers; and bad as they are, there is every reason to fear that they are mox daturos progeniem vitiosiorem." We wonder at the increase of bilious and dyspeptic patients, at the number of new books upon stomach complaints, at the rapid fortunes made by practitioners who undertake (the very word is ominous) to cure indigestion; but how can it be otherwise when Accum, before he took to quoting with his scissors, assured us there was "poison in the pot;" when a recent writer has shown that there are still more deleterious ingredients in the wine-bottle; and when we ourselves have all had dismal intestine evidence that our bread is partly made of ground bones, alum, and plaster of Paris, our tea of sloe-leaves, our beer of injurious drugs, our milk of snails and chalk, and that even the water supplied to us by our companies is any thing rather than the real Simon Pure it professes to be. Not less earnestly than benevolently do our quack doctors implore us to beware of spurious articles; Day and Martin exhort us not to take our polish from counterfeit blacking : every advertiser beseeches the "pensive public" to be upon its guard against suppositious articles-all, in short, is knavery, juggling, cheating, and deception.

This state of universal dishonesty and substitution would be bad enough were it merely confined to commodities, but it is truly alarming when it is extended to persons. It has become so much the fashion to introduce real characters into our novels, satires, and lampoons, personality has been pushed to such a confounding and confounded excess, that we no longer know who is who, (what is what we have long forgotten,) we are ignorant which is the original, which the copy, the type is supplanted by the antitype, and personal identity is altogether lost. "Methinks there are six Harries in the field," cried the disappointed Hotspur. Had he lived in our days, he would have found sixty. Modest authors, who were once content to be anonymous, must now forsooth become pseudonymous, having as many aliases as a professed swindler, and assuming them with the same petty larceny motiveJuly.-VOL. XXIII. NO. XCI.

G

that of obtaining other men's goods under false pretences. The dupes who read and admire Sterne's and Lord Lyttelton's Letters, are far from suspecting that they are forgeries; and wiser heads dream not that in these our days we have many a Chatterton and Ireland hitherto undetected. The " nosce teipsum" is an exploded admonition: if we cannot know others, how can we be expected to know ourselves? It is wiser and safer, and nearer to the truth, to say with Cicero, "All I know with certainty is, that I know nothing."

But the most scandalous imposition, the most cruel quæ pro qua of modern days, is that which is perpetrated by that broad-hipped mocking-bird, who, at the time of the annual migration to England, finds her way hither from Bavaria, Wetteravia, or Westphalia, and impudently passes herself off for the original, genuine Dutch Juffrow, who wending hitherward from the marshy flats of Zealand, Zutphen, and the shores of Zuyder-zee, first made our streets vocal, and, as it were, swept our echoes with the cry of " Buy a Broom!" Alas! the usurpers have almost pushed them from their stools; the Teutonic counterfeit has nearly superseded the original Flemish or Netherland Vrouw. How the former can find their way hither from such distances as Frankfort, Mentz, and the extremities of the lower Rhine, or the still more remote villages of Bavaria,-unless, like the ancient witches, they fly over upon their own broomsticks; or how they can be adequately repaid for such long journeys by the sale of their three-penny ware, it passes my comprehension to surmise; but the whole process appears to me so suspicious, to savour so strongly of the black art, that I would as soon handle the besom of destruction, whereof mention is made in the prophecies, as any of their perilous, magic-fraught commodities. Suppose they were to be suddenly smitten with the amor patriæ, the maladie du pays, to sigh for the dulce domum, who shall assure me that these switch-tailed Bavarian brushes, turning suddenly restive, shall not brush off with me; whisk me up the chimney like smoke; bear me through the air as if I bestrode a Hippogriff, and "sweep to their revenge" by depositing me in one of the muddy canals of Munich, or on the sedgy banks of "Iser rolling rapidly?" Or how, if they tempt me to the floods of the Rhine, beside which they originally grew, plunge me headlong in, leave me to bob among the willows; or, whenever I rise out of breath, push me down again with my own purchased broomstick till the breath is out of me! Such things have been, if the traditions of Germany, and of the Hartz mountains in particular, are to be credited; and, for my own part, I would not touch one of these Bavarian brooms, even if the jade who carries them would give them to me for nothing. "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes."

And why should we run all these risks? why should we encourage impostors? why should we purchase a spurious article, when the real, original, genuine Dutch "Buy a broom" is still occasionally encountered in our streets? If the reader wishes to ascertain the. real Zuyder-zee Juffrow, he has but to look attentively at her features. He will see at once that she has been born below the level of the ocean, nurtured under a dyke, has passed her whole life beneath low-water mark, and that though she may be a stray or waif of Neptune, he has never lost his legal lien upon her, never acknowledged her to be a native legitimate subject of his brother Earth. We dig muscles and

cockle-shells out of terra firma, and call them marine productions; and how can we deny the same designation to the Dutch girl, who, though she may not have actually received birth in the water, cannot claim the merit of being even amphibious in the outward characteristics of her species? She is manifestly one of the "gens humida ponti;" her face is aqueous, swampy, sodden; her hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes, are sandy; her eyes like oysters; her mouth that of a fish: she has suffered no sea change; she is a primitial offspring of ocean, who has stamped her with his seal, until she is hardly distinguishable from the original sea scal, with which she may unquestionably claim some genealogical affinity. Holland, altogether, may be considered as a vast pound for stray Phocæ and Walruses, which, though they may be disguised and swaddled in innumerable quilted petticoats, or voluminous dollar-buttoned inexpressibles, cannot shake off their marine origin so easily as they can put on human trappings. They enact their assumed parts after a very floundering and fishy fashion. How many generations there may have been since the ancestors of your bona fide Dutch "Buy a broom" were mer-men and mermaids; at what exact period Horace's "desinit in piscem" ceased to be applicable to them; under whose reign the tail, by being dragged along the sands, finally divided and assumed the form of legs; and when the original web foot became severed into toes, I leave to Icthyologists, and to the successors of Lord Monboddo, to determine. The Dutch females have in some respects been losers by the step they have thus been enabled to make towards humanity; for if the mermaids were the same as the ancient syrens, the fascination of their voice has not descended; the sharp or guttural tones in which "Buy a broom" is cried in our streets being by no means such dulcet and harmonious breath as would lull the rude sea, or tempt the companions of Ulysses to leap into the waves. In one circumstance we may trace a congeniality of disposition between the fishy ancestor and the semi-feminine descendant of our own days; the latter has an air of cleanliness, and even of personal vanity about her, obviously derived from the original mermaid, who never emerged from the waves without a comb in one hand and a looking-glass in the other, articles which we may presume to have been pilfered from some antediluvian Birmingham at the bottom of the sea. It is just possible, indeed, that at the Deucalian flood-" Omne cum Proteus pecus egit altos Visere montes," they may have supplied themselves with these commodities upon shore; but as Horace makes no mention of any such fact, I rather adhere to my former supposition. This peculiarity offers another ground of distinction between the "neat-handed Phillis" of Holland, and the dirty drab of Germany, of which country the Jung frouws are too often frowzy, and not often enough young; but if the reader have a single doubt upon the subject, and I am most anxious he should not mistake the pebble for the diamond, or the bead for the pearl, let him be careful to observe whether the broom-vender's face resemble a seal's, whether her flesh have the appearance of being fed upon water-zoorje, water-gruel, and water-cresses, whether it be flabby and of a muddy, fenny, and marshy hue, whether her legs be two solid Doric columns of grey worsted, of the same thickness throughout, for all these are prominent diagnosticks of the genuine Dutch Juffrow, " neat as imported." If in addition to these vouchers her quilted petticoats

be redolent of shrimps, red-herrings, and tobacco, if she suggest any thoughts of Taylor the water-poet and his piscatory eclogues, if she make your imagination wallow and flounder upon the shores of the Zuyder-zee, carry it to some low cabin or pot-house within which boors, skippers, watermen, swabbers, and calibans, fat, fusty, and phlegmatic, sit stifling in the mingled smoke of fried sprats, and of their own pipes, which they never draw from their mouths except for the purpose of spitting; if she recall to your memory the scenes and personages that Ostade loved to paint, fraught as they are with the most clownish meanness and revolting vulgarity, you may be well nigh assured that you are not mistaken in your Vrouw, and may purchase her broom with a tolerably safe conscience. Unless, reader, you can sputter such sounds as we may suppose Jonah to have emitted when imprisoned in the whale, you cannot be expected to speak Dutch; but as an additional precaution against the imposture, you may salute the broom-vender with a few words of that language, such as "Goeden morgen. Hae oud zijt gij? hae vaart gij? Wet is de prijs hiewan? Gij vraaght te veel," or any such chaffering phrases, and if she comprehend and answer you in the same jargon, you may incontinently buy a broom, when it would be prudent to brush off with it, lest you should contract a sore throat in attempting to eviscerate the Dutch gutturals, or have the drum of your ear lacerated in listening to sounds as unlike those warbled by Madame Vestris, when she assumes the Dutch garb and sings the song of" Buy a Broom," as the croak of a genuine Juffrow, or Zutphen Meisje is to the " dulcet and harmonious breath" of one of the ancient syrens.

H.

O'HARA'S CHILD.*

ROLL on, thou dark o'ershadowing cloud,
And the wild dreary landscape shroud!
Thou sullen river, deeper moan,

And gurgle round the obstructing stone!
Ye night-birds, with funereal wail,
On your slow-flapping pinions sail,-

Your notes are music to mine ear!
Thy voice, cold hollow midnight wind!
Suits with the temper of my mind:
Why should I court the glare of day?
My last bright hope is rent away:
What shall a swelling heart control,
Or calm the tempest in a soul

Which now has nought to hope or fear?
Long is the road, but the fierce flame
That fires my heart sustains my frame ;
Lone is the path, but be it lone,

All earthly joys from me have flown ;
Night falls around in deepest gloom-

More dark is that cold time-rent tomb

*The extraordinary man who considered himself to be the Chief of the O'Haras, carried the body of his only child sixty miles in his arms to bury it in the tomb of his family, and was committed, on his return, for having concealed pikes in a bog, and died in prison of a fever. The author of this brief poem had the anecdote from the gentleman on whose estate O'Hara resided for several years.