It is but justice to the author to say, that he has adopted a severity of style, and a chastity of manner, that peculiarly accords with the stern and gothic character of the subject.-EDITOR. When I am dead no pageant train Shall waste their sorrows at my bier, For I will die as I did live, Ye shall not raise a marble bust In hollow circumstance of woes; Ye shall not pile, with servile toil, Lay down the wreck of power to rest; But "the scourge of God." ye the mountain stream shall turn, Then bid its everlasting springs Flow back upon the king of kings; And never be the secret said Until the deep give up his head. My gold and silver ye shall fling Back to the clods that gave them birth; The captured crowns of many a king, The ransom of a conquer'd earth; For e'en though dead will I control The trophies of the Capitol. But when beneath the mountain tide Ye've laid your monarch down to rot, Ye shall not rear upon its side Pillar nor mound to mark the spot; My course was like the river deep, And where I went the spot was curst: Nor blade of grass again was seen, Where Alaric and his hosts had been. See how their haughty barriers fail Not for myself did I ascend In judgment my triumphal car; 'Twas God alone on high did send The avenging Scythian to the war, To shake abroad, with iron hand, The appointed scourge of his command. And vengeance sat upon the helm; Across the everlasting Alp I poured the torrent of my powers, My course is run, my errand done, But never yet shall set the sun Of glory that adorns my name; And Roman hearts shall long be sick, When men shall think of Alaric. My course is run, my errand done, And in the caves of vengeance wait, And soon mankind shall blench away New Monthly Magazine.* MY BROTHER'S GRAVE. THE following poem breathes a tone of deep melancholy, not unlike the dirge of Alaric, but possesses a tenderness and sweetness of which the dirge was rendered incapable by the ferocious unbending character of the person by whom it is spoken. After placing before us the "deep" and "still silence" of That unstartled sleep The living eye hath never known, and terrifying us with the inania regna of the ideal world, how sublimely and happily is the following image introduced. The lonely Sexton's footstep falls In dismal echoes on the walls. We do not think that the circumstance mentioned in the two lines And cheerful is my mother's brow, My father's eye hath lost its gloom, is in harmony with the entire piece. The circumstance, indeed, may be true and natural, that is, it is true that parents may forget their grief, and it is also natural they should do so after a long lapse of time; but poetic feeling is of a much higher order than natural feeling. All readers will admit there is nothing unnatural in the parents having, at length, forgot their son ; but what reader will admire them for doing so? what The Editor of the New Monthly Magazine informs us that this Dirge was "written by Professor EVERITT, of America; and couceives that they do no discredit to that gentleman's respectable name." reader would not admire them more, had the memory of their son never recurred to them without inducing sad and melancholy emotions? The act of forgetting the son is not, therefore, a poetic circumstance, because it produces no emotion in us whatever: we can look on such parents with indifference, and whenever any circumstance leaves the mind cool and unaffected, we may safely pronounce that it has no pretensions to poetry. The poetry that does not move us is poetry only in name. Non satis est pulchra esse poemata, dulcia sunto, Et quocumque volent animum auditoris agunto. Beneath the chancel's hallowed stone, Few words upon the rough stone 'graven, The place is silent: rarely sound Nor hum of business, dull and loud, To death's lone dwelling speaks of life, ED. |