I feel the tears of blood arise

Up from my heart unto my eyes,

Oriana.

Within thy heart my arrow lies, Oriana.

Oh! cursed hand! oh! cursed blow! Oriana!

Oh! happy thou that liest low,

Oriana!

All night the silence seems to flow

Beside me in my utter woe,

Oriana.

A weary, weary way I go,

Oriana.

When Norland winds pipe down the sea,

Oriana,

I walk, I dare not think of thee,

Oriana.

Thou liest beneath the greenwood tree,

I dare not die and come to thee,

Oriana.

I hear the roaring of the sea,

Oriana.

But the highest of all this young poet's achievements, is the visionary and romantic strain, entitled, " Recollections of the Arabian Nights." It is delightful even to us, who read not the Arabian Nights, nor ever heard of them, till late in lifewe think we must have been in our tenth year; the same heartsoul-mind - awakening year that brought us John Bunyan and Robinson Crusoe, and in which-we must not say with whom we first fell in love. How it happened that we had lived so long in this world without seeing or hearing tell of these famous worthies, is a mystery; for we were busy from childhood with books and bushes, banks and braes, with libraries full of white, brown, and green leaves, perused in schoolroom, whose window in the slates shewed the beautiful blue braided skies, or in fields and forests, (so we thought the birch coppice, with its old pines, the abode of linties and cushats-for no long, broad, dusty, high-road was there-and but footpaths or sheep-walks winded through the pastoral silence that surrounded that singing or cooing grove,) where beauty filled the sunshiny day with delight, and grandeur the one-starred gloaming with fear. But so it was; we knew not that there was an Arabian Night in the whole world. Our souls, in stir or stillness, saw none but the sweet Scottish stars. We knew, indeed, that they rose, and set, too, upon other climes; and had we been asked the question, should have said that they certainly did so; but we felt that they and their heavens belonged to Scotland. And so feels the fond, foolish old man still, when standing by himself at midnight, with wither. ed hands across his breast, and eyes lifted heavenwards, that shew the brightest stars somewhat dim now, yet beautiful as ever; out walks the moon from behind a cloud, and he thinks of long Loch Lomond glittering afar off with lines of radiance that lift up in their loveliness, flush after flush-and each silvan pomp is statelier than the last now one, now another, of her heron-haunted isles!

But in our egoism and egotism we have forgot Alfred Tennyson. To his heart, too, we doubt not that heaven seems almost always an English heaven; he, however, must have been familiar long before his tenth year with the Arabian Nights' Entertainments; for had he discovered them at that advanced period of life, he had not now so passionately and so imaginatively sung their wonders.

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS.

WHEN the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free
In the silken sail of infancy,
The tide of time flowed back with me

The forward-flowing tide of time;
And many a sheeny summer morn,
Adown the Tigris I was borne,
By Bagdat's shrines of fretted gold,
High-walléd gardens green and old;
True Mussulman was I and sworn,
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.

Anight my shallop, rustling through
The low and bloomed foliage, drove
The fragrant, glistening deeps, and clove
The citron shadows in the blue:

By garden porches on the brim,
The costly doors flung open wide,
Gold glittering through lamplight dim,
And broidered sofas on each side:

In sooth it was a goodly time,
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.

Often, where clear stemmed platans guard
The outlet, did I turn away
The boat-head down a broad canal
From the main river sluiced, where all
The sloping of the moonlit sward
Was damask work, and deep inlay

Of breaded blosms unmown, which crept
Adown to where the waters slept.

A goodly place, a goodly time,
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid!

A motion from the river won

Ridged the smooth level, bearing on
My shallop through the star-strown calm,
Until another night in night
I entered, from the clearer light,
Imbowered vaults of pillared palm,
Imprisoning sweets, which, as they clomb
Heavenward, were stayed beneath the dome
Of hollow boughs. -A goodly time,
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid!

Still onward; and the clear canal
Is rounded to as clear a lake.
From the green rivage many a fall
Of diamond rillets musical,
Through little crystal arches low
Down from the central fountain's flow
Fall'n silver-chiming, seemed to shake
The sparkling flints beneath the prow.
A goodly place, a goodly time,
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid!

Above through many a bowery turn
A walk with vary-coloured shells
Wandered engrained. On either side
All round about the fragrant marge,
From fluted vase, and brazen urn
In order, eastern flowers large,
Some drooping low their crimson bells
Half-closed, and others studded wide
With disks and tiars, fed the time
With odour in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.

Far off, and where the lemon grove
In closest coverture upsprung,
The living airs of middle night
Died round the bulbul as he sung.
Not he: but something which possessed
The darkness of the world, delight,
Life, anguish, death, immortal love
Ceasing not, mingled, unrepressed,
Apart from place, withholding time,
But flattering the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.

T

be blown back in showers, as if upon balmy breezes changing suddenly and softly to the airt whence inspiration at the moment breathes, yet not one in a thousand is worth being caught and pinned down on paper into poetry, "gently as if you loved him"-only the few that are bright with the "beauty still more beauteous" and a few such belong to all the orders-from the little silly moth that extinguishes herself in your taper, up to the mighty Emperor of Morocco at meridian wavering his burnished downage in the unconsuming sun who glorifies the wondrous stranger.

Now, Mr Tennyson does not seem to know this; or if he do, he is selfwilled and perverse in his sometimes almost infantile vanity; (and how vain are most beautiful children!) and thinks that any Thought or Feeling or Fancy that has had the honour and the happiness to pass through his mind, must by that very act be worthy of everlasting commemoration. Heaven pity the poor world, were we to put into stanzas, and publish upon it, all our thoughts, thick as mots in the sun, or a summer evening atmosphere of midges!

Finally, Nature is mighty, and poets should deal with her on a na grand scale. She lavishes her glorious gifts before their path in such profusion, that Genius-reverent as he is of the mysterious mother, and meeting her at sunrise on the mountains with grateful orisons-with grateful orisons bidding her farewell among the long shadows that stretch across the glens when sunset sinks into the sea-is yet privileged to tread with a seeming scorn in the midst of imagery that to common eyes would be as a revelation of wonders from another world. Familiar to him are they as the grass below his feet. In lowlier moods he looks at them-and in his love they grow beautiful. So did

Burns beautify the daisy-" wee modest crimson-tipped flower!" But in loftier moods, the "violet by the mossy stone," is not "half-hidden to the eye" it is left unthought of to its own sweet existence. The poet then ranges wide and high, like Thomson, in his Hymn to the Seasons, which he had so gloriously sung, seeing in all the changes of the rolling year "but the varied god,"like Wordsworth, in his Excursion, communing too with the spirit "whose dwelling is the light of setting suns."

Those great men are indeed among the

Lights of the world and demigods of fame;"

but all poets, ere they gain a bright name, must thus celebrate the worship of nature. So is it, too, with painters. They do well, even the greatest of them, to trace up the brooks to their source in stone-basin or mossy well, in the glen-head, where greensward glades among the heather seem the birthplace of the Silent People-the Fairies. But in their immortal works they must shew us how "red comes the river down;" castles of rock or of cloudlong withdrawing vales, where midway between the flowery foreground, and in the distance of blue mountain ranges, some great city lifts up its dim-seen spires through the misty smoke beneath which imagination hears the hum of life" peaceful as some immeasurable plain," the breast of old ocean sleeping in the sunshine-or as if an earthquake shook the pillars of his caverned depths, tumbling the foam of his breakers, mast-high, if mast be there, till the canvass ceases to be silent, and the gazer hears him howling over his prey-See-see!-the foundering wreck of a three-decker going down head-foremost to eternity.

With such admonition, we bid Alfred Tennyson farewell.

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