Harcourt was a witness of the recognition, and his brow clouded. Our hero saw this, and the sting of rivalry, as well as his long smouldering love, called up all his powers, and he exerted himself to please, taxing to its utmost that conversational faculty for which he had once been so celebrated. And, whether it was the remembrance of his past service, or the natural coquetry of the sex that prompted her, Miss Conway certainly devoted most of her attention to our hero. Her powers of mind were scarcely inferior to his, and soon a large circle of interested listeners had gathered around them, for the dinner

was now over.

"You should see the old mill up the road," said Miss Conway, at length. "Have you ever been there, Mr. Hastings? No. Well then let me be your guide. I suppose you are not frightened at a wild road. For my part, I am as bold as a chamois, as you shall see."

They departed as she spoke, only a few of the company following on this somewhat perilous expedition; and before long they found themselves alone. Hastings was not sorry, for he longed to change the conversation to a less flippant one, which was scarcely possible when surrounded by a laughing group. In this he succeeded, and found the mind of his companion amply stored with intellectual knowledge. Insensibly they grew silent, until, at length, a gap in the woods disclosed, from the height where

they stood, the spot on which they first met three years before. At sight of it, the fair girl on his arm turned and looked up into his eyes with an expression which told volumes; but her gaze was instantly withdrawn when she saw it met that of Hastings, while a torrent of blood rushed over her face and brow.

"You never called on us," she said soon, in a tone of half reproach, breaking what began to grow a dangerous silence.

"I sailed the next morning, and, in the bewilderment of my emotions, forgot your address," said Hastings: then, recollecting the full force of what he admitted, and hurried along by irresistible impulse, which is, perhaps, only the sympathy of soul with soul, he poured forth to his now trembling companion the history of his heart since they had last met, the wild dreams he had cherished, and the almost visionary hope which he now breathed.

"Send me from your presence, if you will," he said, passionately, seizing her hand, as she averted her head. They tell me your heart is already another's-I see I am presumptuous-forgive me-and farewell forever."

He would have dropped her hand, but she clung to it tremblingly, and, in a voice scarce audible, said, "My heart has been yours only-" and then sunk sobbing on his bosom.

So there is such a thing as love at first sight, or our tale is untrue.

1 feel the rush of waves that 'round me rise-
The tossing of my bark upon the sea;

Few sunbeams linger in the stormy skies,
And youth's bright shore is lessening on the lee!
There, when I dwelt, I wildly longed to be
Out on the heaving waters. Now my heart

Owns cares my thoughtless childhood could not see,
Or, seeing, feared not; duties round me start,
And toils that mark the brow ere boyhoood's years depart.
The soul needs stronger armor for the fight,

Than that it wore in morning's idle hours; Relying on its own unaided might,

And, God-sustained, its great and lofty powers Will bear it thro' the strife that threat'ning lowers; While struggles here and there a sunny ray

From brighter skies-my steps are not on flowersA Python watches near Life's entrance way, And, like Hyperion bold, I arm me for the fray. Sometimes my heart will sink when I behold What toils, what trials in the future lie;

I fear its fiery zeal may soon grow cold

To the pure promptings of a nature highBorn of that flame whose glow can never die; That the cold scorn of worldly ones and proud, Who do not see the dust in which they lie, Will check the impulse of spirit, vowed

To feel and act for all, whom wrong or wo hath bowed.

For few there are who know how longs the soul
To grasp at higher and sublimer things;
What dreams of glory o'er its vision roll-

What heavenly sunshine glows upon its wings!
How, soaring up, the dross of earth it flings
And speaks with spirits in a purer sphere;

Few bend to drink at those eternal springs
Where Fancy, Truth, and Feeling linger near,
And make the soul forget the ill it suffers here!
Yet there are times when, worn by wasting strife,
The heart forgets its duty and its power;
How strange seems then the mystery of life-

How dreamy-like and vague, the present hour! Though black'ning clouds about the future lower, We heed them not, by toil and doubt o'ercome,

While on our minds the swift forebodings showerHow sped the spirit from its distant home, And where, when life is o'er, its bolder wing will roam?

Away with fear! the battle has begun;

Who falters now, must bear a craven heart; On with a glorious hope, and it is won,

Though the foe's serried ranks around me start, And friends, faint-hearted, from my side depart. How vain are all the toils we meet with here

The scourge of wrong and care's envenomed dartIf we but feel a better world is near,

And voices from the loved and lost our weary spirits cheer!

Reviews constitute the judicial department of the re public of letters. The judges hold a very important advantage over their brethren of the bench, in being selfnominated, and in keeping their offices during bad as well as good behavior. They are generally learned and estimable gentlemen, who are impelled by a disinterested love of letters, and the hope of a moderate gratuity, to exercise a jurisdiction over literature, and be the repository of a bad author's surplus revenue of curses, threats and lamentations. They decide on all offences, from petty larceny to high crimes and misdemeanors. Some of their number are willing to exercise the humble but important functions of literary police, and bring to justice and the gibbet the pickpockets who skulk in the lanes and alleys of letters, and obtain a precarious livelihood by filching from their betters. These are the Fouchés and Vidocqs of criticism. Others are engaged in cases of more dignity, requiring a more extensive knowledge of the law, and attended by circumstances of greater pomp and pretension. As the voice of large bodies carries more weight than individual judgments, their persons are concealed in the spreading folds of the editorial "WE," in order that the author whom each condemns, may have the satisfaction of imagining that the human race, and not one individual, pronounces the sentence. Their decisions are thus made fearless and oracular, and the effect upon culprits unspeakably impressive. A considerable part of their business is, of course, a hanging business. They often choke a poet with his own lines. As they are compelled to punish mercilessly a large variety of offences not recognizable in other courts, and to tease, pelt, pound, cut, slash, burn, behead, quarter, rack and ruin a considerable number of delicate gentlemen with friends and families, their judicial ministrations and visitations are continually hailed with curses loud and deep, and the justice of the damnation they dispense is sometimes impudently brought in question. They have often to deal with fools and knaves, who are unhappily ignorant of their conditionwho close those natural inlets of knowledge which would convey the fact to their hearts-and who never can be made to believe that the rack on which they are stretched, or the hot iron with which they are branded, or the gallows on which they are suspended, has a logical connection with the public interest and their own eventual good. Of the advantage of having a body of men in the community, who are willing to exercise the important funetions we have noted, none but an author or a philanthropist can question. A nation producing books and not producing critics would soon fall into decay and mediocrity. Every body would be soft, sensitive and sentimental. Society would change from being a society for mutual distrust and contempt, into a society for "mutual admiration." The wolf would indeed lie down with the lamb, but it would be all a lie. The ignorant, the foolish, and the presumptuous, the fat-witted, the addle-brained, the leaden-headed, the feather-hearted, would not be told of their stupidities and absurdities, and would suffer from a lack of the information. Dullness, with her bleared blue eyes, and Debility, with her vapid, tottering pace, and

and Conceit, with his brisk smirk, would all realize their ideals. Books would soon become penances for sins. Nine-tenths of those who attempted to master the literature of the time, would commit suicide or insanity before they had got through its lighter branches. A dense, murky atmosphere, unvisited by rain and lightning, would envelop the literary world. Books and authors would be virtually damned, without the aid of reviews. It is to prevent such a condition of things, that critics have nominated themselves to the offices of intellectual torture; and, with this horrible vision of triumphant dullness in their mind, they have shown no disposition to shrink from the infliction of judicious pain. Such voluntary assumption of arduous responsibilities would, in any society not swayed by vanity and pride, give them a high rank among self-sacrificing public benefactors.

Among these estimable men, few have displayed more activity than the Rev. Sydney Smith. He was the originator and first editor of the Edinburgh Review, and an occasional contributor to its pages for thirty years. The volumes of his writings, now first republished in this country, are mostly filled with articles from that celebrated periodical. When Smith commenced his labors, the litsrary republic was fast verging to that doleful state which we have just indicated. Authors without brains, and reviewers without teeth, played a game of mutual toleration. Grub street was triumphant. Mediocrity had risen fifty, per cent. by the nomination of Henry James Pye to the laureatship. The principle, that a man who wrote books should possess brains, had passed into a tradition. Smith revived this antique error, and applied it rigorously to authorship. There was, at once, a universal scream of horror sent forth from all literary lubber-land at the announcement, and shrieks and threats without number at the practical operation. Lazy clergymen, who dawdled in rich benefices, and at stated intervals published poor sermons; rapacious and mean-minded politicians, who occasionally favored the world with printed reasons why they should continue to fatten on public plunder; pedants, who discoursed dullness in a style of dignity; sentimental young women, who put nonsense and weakness in a metrical shape, under an impulse from tender, outraged, and senseless sensibilities; and the vast collection of literary lazzaroni, whose daily object was to prevent their gastric juices from preying upon the stomach itself, by producing dullness, obscenity, scandal, and sedition, in a pamphlet form, for the edification and the sixpences of the reading world; all these were more or less disturbed by the onslaught of Sydney's infernal machine, and all joined in denouncing it, in language suited to their culture and station. The charges of infidelity, malignity, cruelty, ignorance, bad taste, were brought against it, but to no purpose. On it went-each number a deadly missile pitched into the ranks of authorship, scattering death and confusion among the whole tribe. It was a thundergust after a hot, muggy, close, pestiferous day, and it purified the atmosphere.

Sydney Smith's colloquial wit has long been celebrated. This edition of his writings will show how deeply the humorous is seated in his nature. They glitter all over

with wit. Every thing that he touches "suffers a change," to accommodate it to the purposes of his dominant faculty. All varieties of the ludicrous-some of them too refined to be noticed in a superficial perusal-are represented in his compositions. The sharp, quick fling of contempt is his most potent weapon as a reviewer. This he made felt among all whose literary or political sins provoked his indignation, or excited his ridicule. Its exercise on the denizens of Grub street we have already noticed; and it is displayed at length in a number of the brilliant and condensed reviews with which these volumes abound. But Smith, as a judge, it must be confessed, is rather hard in one respect. He has no written code, but is a law unto himself. What his sovereign pleasure declares to be bad, rnust be taken as bad by the author whom he condemns. He sometimes affects the Grand Vizier, and acts as if there wwere no law above the bow-string and the bastinado. In his jerks and jets of brilliant petulance, there is often some injustice. He cannot bear dullness in any form. Setting out on the broad principle that writing books is a crime, which writing good books only can extenuate, and having his notion of good books somewhat narrowed by his own individual tastes and associations, he is a better -critic of mediocrity than of merit. If he entangles an author in a "quirkish reason," or spits him with a keen sarcasm, or sets him floating in a sea of humor, or roasts him slowly with irony, or exposes his weak points to a rattling fire of jibes, or runs a shaft of ridicule neatly through him, or ingeniously puts his legs in the stocks of caricature, or tars and feathers him all over with jests and mockeries-if he does this with a dunce, Sydney conceives he has performed an important service to society, and preaches the next Sunday on the inward satisfaction resulting from a good conscience.

But Smith is not merely a pleasant scoffer at folly and stupidity; he possesses a heart which revolts at all forms of political injustice. He has been through his life a reformer. The Tory party in Great Britain ever found in him an acute detector of abuses, and an unsparing denouncer of corruption. The influence of his writings on the great question of Reform it might be difficult to estimate; but the overthrow of a number of minor abuses has been traced directly to his articles in the Edinburgh Review. His strong good sense fastened instantly on the practical view of every question he treated; and his keen sense of the ludicrous enabled him to detect the absurdity, as well as the wickedness, of some of the "time-honored" cruelties of law and legislation. No person of his day equaled him in turning a "respectable" and "venerable" monument of the injustice of the past, into an object of contempt. He broke the charm contained in that everlastingly repeated phrase, the "wisdom of our ancestors;" and in doing that he struck at all the bigotry, rapacity and tyranny, which it covered. He looked things right in the face, and called them by their right names. The station and pretensions of the individual passed as nothing with him, when they were used as a decent cloak to inhumanity and selfishness. He emancipated himself from the dominion of phrases, catch-words and titles.

We hope this elegant edition of his writings will have an extensive circulation. A glance at some of the articles on America, will show that he has been a good friend to our country in times when it was policy to libel her, and that the misrepresentations of some foreign tourists and slavish politicians he has repeatedly exposed and lashed. Even, however, if the volumes did not contain so much sense, wisdom and information, their brilliant and fanciful wit, and singular felicity and condensation of language, should win them readers.

Memoirs and Poetical Remains of Henry Kirke White; also Melancholy Hours; with an Introduction by Rev. John Todd. One vol., 12mo. Perkins & Purves, Philadelphia,

1844.

The early promise and premature death of Henry Kirke White have thrown a melancholy interest about his name, which will ensure this edition of his works a wide spread and deserved popularity. We say deserved, because there is much in the poetry of White, apart from the genius it displays, that claims our commendation. We do not think his verse is of that lofty character which some of his admirers have asserted; it is not, for instance, equal to that of Keats, though, on the other hand, it is superior to Chatterton's; but there breathes through it a fervent piety, and it contains such promise of future excellence, that, in reviewing it, we forget, or willingly forego, the critic's harsher mood, and speak of it as we do of the productions of the lamented Margaret and Lucretia Davidson.

Henry Kirke White was the son of an obscure butcher in Nottingham, England, and was born in 1785. At school he passed for a dunce, though his poetic vein even then displayed itself in satires on his teachers. For awhile he served as a butcher boy, carrying meat daily to his father's customers, and afterwards he was apprenticed to a stocking weaver; but to both these avocations he had a strong distaste; to use his own phrase, "he wanted something to occupy his brain ;" and his mother, who discerned her son's abilities, at length succeeded in having him apprenticed to an attorney, in his native town. With this profession he was at first satisfied, but he soon began to have higher views; and from a skeptic becoming a sincere Christian, he aspired to a university education, and the office of a minister in the established church. With a view to aid him in his education, he published a volume of poems, which, notwithstanding a deprecatory letter to the editor, was bitterly assailed in the Monthly Review. As in the case of Keats, this attack almost broke his spirits; but the countenance of Southey, and other friends, hap pily reanimated him, and he finally succeeded in his darling wish and was entered at Cambridge. Here he applied himself assiduously to study, and at the end of the term was declared the first man of his year. From this period to the day of his death, his college life was a series of continued triumphs; but, alas! each new victory, by spurring him on to greater exertions, only goaded him nearer to the grave. He often studied fourteen hours a day, allowing himself but two hours for recreation. No constitution but one of iron could withstand this. After several attacks of sickness, from all of which he recovered only to apply himself as intensely as ever, he was seized with a fatal disease, which, if it had spared his life, would have probably left him a lunatic or idiot. Happily he died, and the sympathy excited by his fate has made his name immortal.

We do not mean by this to say, with some of the flippant critics of our time, that there is nothing in the poetry of White to make him worthy to be remembered "with his land's language." There is, on the contrary, decided genius even in his earlier productions, and his later poems evince an increasing strength, with continued promise. This, when we recollect that White died in his twentysecond year, and that for several months before his decease he wrote little or nothing, is sufficient to entitle him to the high praise even of Byron's celebrated eulogy.

In the edition of his works before us, the editor, the Rev. John Todd, a man favorably known as a sound thinker both here and abroad, attributes a portion of White's popularity to the fact that a youth writing to youth will always strike a responsive chord. The remark