MY LIFE.. making him forget even himself in her young unshadowed beauty. I go forward for years, and see her luxuriant hair put soberly away from her brow, and her girlish graces ripen into dignity, and bright loveliness chastened with the gentle meekness of maternal affection. Her husband looks on her with a proud eye, shows her the same fervent love and delicate attentions which first won her, and her fair children are growing up about them; and they go on full of honor and untroubled years, and are remembered when they die. I say I love to dream thus when I go to give the young bride joy. It is the natural tendr ency of feeling touched by loveliness, that fears nothing for itself; and if I ever yield to darkened feelings, it is because the light of the picture is changed. I am not fond of dwelling on such changes, and I will not minutely, now. I allude to it only because I trust that my simple page will be read by some of the young and beautiful beings who daily move across my path; and I would whisper to them as they glide by joyously and confidently, the secret of an unclouded future. The picture I have drawn above is not peculiar. It is colored like the fancies of the bride; and many, oh! many an hour will she sit with her rich jewels lying loosely in her fingers, and dream such dreams as these. She believes them, too-and she goes on awhile undeceived. The evening is not too long while they talk of plans for happiness, and the quiet meal is still a pleasant and delightful novelty of mutual reliance and attention. There comes soon, however, a time when personal topics become bare and wearisome, and slight attentions will not alone keep up the social excitement. There are long intervals of silence, detected symptoms of weariness; and the husband first, in his manhood, breaks in upon the hours they were wont to spend together——I cannot follow it circumstantially. Then come long hours of unhappy restlessness and terrible misgivings of each other's worth and affection, till by and by they can conceal their uneasiness no longer, and go out separately to seek relief, and lean upon the hollow world for the support which one who was their lover and friend could not give them! Heed this, ye who are winning, by your innocent beauty, the affection of high-minded and thinking beings. Remember that he will give up the brother of his heart, with whom he has had even fellowship of mind; the society of the race 305 of fame, who have held with him a stern companionship; and frequently, in his passionate love, he will break away from the arena of his burning ambition, to come to listen to the "voice of the charmer." It will bewilder at first; but it will not long. And then, think you that an idle blandishment will change a mind that has been used for years to an equal communion? Think you he will give up for a weak dalliance, the animating theme of man, and the search into the mysteries of knowledge! Oh no, lady! believe me, no! Trust not your influence to such light fetters. Credit not the old-fashioned absurdity that woman's is a secondary lot, ministering to the necessities of her lord and master. Is not your immortality as complete, and your gift of mind as capable as ours? I would put no wisdom of mine against God's allotment. I would charge you to water the undying bud, and give it a healthy culture, and open its beauty to the sun : bound with another, you will go on equally, and in a fellowship that shall pervade every earthly interest. MY LIFE. BY E. L. E. --- My life is like the summer wave, That dies in silence on the sand, Leaving where thousand billows lave Not e'en a trace along the strand. My life is like the feeblest star That glimmers where some central sun Pours its full radiance from afar ; Why gaze upon that palest one? My life is like a wayside flower Of the world's daily, dusty walk : Who stoops to look for sweetness' power In the crushed leaf and bruiséd stalk! My life is like an untuned lyre, Whose tones the wandering breezes wake, Whose strings convey no poet's fire, But lone complain, or silent, break. My life-oh! favored one of earth, It is not thine to know how, yet, Have hope and suffering, love and mirth, In its dim, brief heart-history met. My life-oh, Thou who gavest it me! Though lone it bloom, and faint it shine, Fraught deep with immortality, In deathless years shall rival Thine. 306 HAGEDORN. BY REV. E. H. GILLETT. HAGEDORU. FREDERIC VON HAGEDORN was one of the earliest German poets whose independent taste scorned the fetters of the schools, and aimed successfully at the simple and the natural. Born in 1708, he was rising to eminence at just the period when the stiff and pedautic Gottsched exercised an almost dictatorial authority over German literature. The good sense and natural taste of Hagedorn led him to disown and resist this usurpation; nor when the Swiss Bodiner offered open and avowed opposition to the theories and maxims of Gottsched, would Hagedorn yield his adherence to the new party. Free from the shackles of all poetic schools, restricted by no provincial spirit, relying only upon his own correct taste, he presents a refreshing spectacle of literary eminence, independent of all the affectations of the age. He carried out in his own person to its application, the patriotic principle afterwards recognized by others, that "all Germany is the fatherland of the German poet." Hagedorn was a native of Hamburg. His father was a man of wealth and respectable standing in that city. Soon after the birth of his son, he was unfortunate in the loss of the greater portion of his property. But the education of young Hagedorn was not neglected. His efforts and talents at an early age promised the eminence that would reward parental anxiety. At the age of eleven years, he composed one of the most beautiful of his poems, which scarce needed the revision of his maturer years. While only fourteen years of age, he was left an orphan, and found himself dependent on his own exertions for support. He however continued his studies at the Gymnasium in Hamburg till 1726, when he removed to the University of Jena as a student of law. We may reasonably suppose that the perusal of the dry principles of jurisprudence was sometimes lightened by devotion to the muse, and that the young poet found the writings of the English and Greek poets more congenial reading than his law-books afforded. At least his first volume of poems bears date the same year with the completion of his professional course. This enterprise, undertaken in his twenty-first year, did not meet the approval of his later judgment. The more just taste of a mature experience condemned the productions of his youthful muse; he sought to recover the whole edition, withdraw it from circulation, and leave it to oblivion. In 1730, such was the reputation and respect which he had already acquired, that he was invited, as private secretary, to accompany the Baron Von Salenthal, Danish Ambassador, to England. He resided at London, however, only one year, returning to the Continent and travelling in Brabant and Holland till his return to his native city. Here he obtained, in 1733, the post of secretary to the English factory at Hamburg. The salary was sufficient to place him in easy circumstances, while his official duties left him sufficient leisure for literary pursuits. His family relations were of the most happy character. Surrounded by friends, his home was the abode of comfort and social enjoyment. "His life," says his biographer, "was itself poetry, and it only needed to be copied out fairly in its spirit, to give us what the poet has really produced.” It was not until 1738 that Hagedorn again appeared before the public as an author. In this year he published the first book of his Fables, which were much admired. In 1740 he published his "Man of Letters," and in 1743 hia celebrated poem "On Happinees," which established his reputation as a moral writer. The second book of his Fables appeared in 1750; and he afterwards produced many lyrical pieces in the style of the English Prior, whom he had evidently studied with care. Wieland, in the preface to his poetical works, terms him the German Horace, a high but unquestionably. deserved praise. Hagedorn died of the disease of the dropsy, 1754, at the age of forty-six. The principal works of Hagedorn are his Fables, Moral Poems, Songs, and Tales. All of them betray the good sense and genial nature of the man. There is nothing transcendental or sombre about him. His satire is often characterized by the broadest humor. In imagination and pathos he does not excel. In good-natured ridicule and a sportive fancy, he has rarely been surpassed. His writings all discover a healthy moral tone. His wisdom is often veiled by his wit. In his "elegy" of the Rich Sir Jost, in which he traces his life, in all its laughable littlenesses, from his birth to his splendid funeral, he exhibits to contempt the pride of a rich and cumbrous indolence, yet forces us to smile while we scorn. His style is characterized by freshness and perepiquity. It is always agreeable, though scarcely to be called affluent. There is no profusion of intellectual wealth, but rather a wise frugality in the use of his intrusted talent. Of conscientious advocates, Ready to serve, how large the number! Each client's rights he fairly states, Nor will himself with treachery cumber. And who--to each his merit givingWill question the physician's skill, Whose recipe 's effectual still, Whether his patient's dead or living. How rich the learned world in lore! In master-spirits, how abounding! The meed their labors win, no more Is lost. Momus their praise is sounding. His spleen at writers he indulges, Only when He receives no praise: Excess of taste-too great delaysThese are the faults that he divulges, Who can your virtues comprehending- The statesman, great in real worth, Is found in every land on earth, In royal heart, at will commanding. And they who rule have ample knowledge; The art to govern soon is learned, And their own title quickly earned By sceptred hands. They need no college. The Briton mutual love creates, Strangers to his own trades indenting; The quiet Frenchman, HE translates; We Dutch are busy in inventing. Give Spanish pride the well-earned merit Of freedom, humor, truth, and thrift; To fame the sweating Belgian lift; Let Munich's concourse praise inherit. How great and manifold the fame That lifts all Europe up to glory, And writes so worthily her name, Hallowed upon the page of story! The Turks! no praises will I grant them, Although they learn to be like us, Drink wine, get never in a muss, Speak what they think, and none can daunt them, Is then our age so glorious? Who shall disclose what future ages One single prayer the poet raises RUINS. BY PROF. WILSON. 307 RUINS! Among all the external objects of imagination, surely they are most affecting! Some sumptuous edifice of a former age, still standing in its undecayed strength, has undoubtedly a great command over us, from the ages that have flowed over it; but the mouldering edifice which Nature has begun to win to herself and to dissolve into her own bosom, is far more touching to the heart and awakening to the spirit. It is beautiful in its decay — not merely because green leaves, and wild flowers, and creeping mosses soften its rugged frown, but because they have sown themselves on the decay of greatness; they are monitors to our fancy, like the flowers on a grave of the untroubled rest of the dead. Battlements riven by the hand of time, and cloistered arches reft it often unconsciously, under the influence of such imagination, strives to hide from itself the utter nothingness of its mightiest works. And when all its glories are visibly crumbling into dust, it creates some imaginary power to overthrow the fabrics of human greatness - and thus attempts to derive a kind of mournful triumph, even in its very fall. Thus, when nations have faded away, in their sins and vices, rotten at the heart and palsied in all their limbs, we strive not to think of that sad internal decay, but imagine some mighty power smiting empires and cutting short the records of mortal magnifi cence. Thus, Fate and Destiny are said in our and rent, speaking to us of the warfare and of the piety of our ancestors-of the pride of their might, and the consolations of their sorrow: they revive dim shadows of departed life, evoked from the land of forgetfulness; but they touch, us more deeply when the brightness which the sun flings on the broken arches, and the warbling of birds that are nestled in the chambers of princes, and the moaning of winds through the crevices of towers, round which the surges of war were shattered and driven back, lay those phantoms again to rest in their silent bed, and show us, in the monuments of human life and power, the visible footsteps of Time and Oblivion, coming on in their everlasting and irresist-imagination to lay our glories low. Thus, even ible career, to sweep down our perishable race, and to reduce all the forms of our momentary being into the indistinguishable elements of their original nothing. What is there below the skies like the place of mighty and departed cities-the vanishing or vanished capitals of renowned empires? There is no other such desolation. The solitudes of nature may be wild and drear, but they are not like the solitude from which human glory is swept away. The overthrow or decay of mighty human power is, of all thoughts that can enter the mind, the most overwhelming. The whole imagination is at once stirred by the prostration of that, round which so many high associations have been collected for so many ages. Beauty seems born but to perish, and its fragility is seen and felt to be inherent in it by a law of its being. But power gives stability, as it were, to human thought, and we forget our own perishable nature in the spectacle of some abiding and enduring greatness. Our own little span of years-our own confined region of space-are lost in the endurance and far-spread dominion of some mighty state, and we feel as if we partook of its deepset and triumphant strength. When, therefore, a great and ancient empire falls in pieces, or when fragments of its power are heard rent asunder, like column after column disparting from some noble edifice, in sad conviction, we feel as if all the cities of men were built on foundations beneath which the earthquake sleeps. The same doom seems to be imminent over all the other kingdoms that still stand; and in the midst of such changes, and decays, and overthrowsor as we read of them of old-we look, under such emotions, on all power as foundationless, and in our wide imagination embrace empires covered only with the ruins of their desolation. Yet such is the pride of the human spirit, that the calm and silent air of oblivion has been thought of as an unsparing power. Time, too, though in moral sadness wisely called a shadow, has been clothed with terrific attributes, and the sweep of his scythe has shorn the towery diadem of cities. Thus the mere sigh in which we expire has been changed into active power-and all the nations have with one voice called out "Death!" And while mankind have sunk, and fallen, and disappeared in the helplessness of their own mortal being, we have still spoken of powers arrayed against them-powers that are in good truth only another name for their own weakness. Thus Imagination is for ever fighting against Truth—and even when humbled, her visions are sublime-conscious even amongst saddest ruin of her own immortality. AND thou hast found thy home, far, far beyond I watched the languid pulse, thy last, low sigh, Where autumn winds moan through the silent grove, |