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Dull flats, scream-startled, as the exulting train
Streams like a meteor through the frighted night,
Wind-billowed plains of wheat, and marshy fens,
Unto whose reeds on midnights blue and cold,
Long strings of geese come clanging from the stars,
Yet wealthier in one child than all of these."

Thither Walter accompanies him. We subjoin part of a dialogue between him and the "one child," in whom, more than in all his land, old Mr. Wilmott was blest. Walter had been describing his own story under the name of another per

son.

"Violet. Did you know well that youth of whom you spake? Walter. Know him! Oh yes; I knew him as myself,

Two passions dwelt at once within his soul,

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Violet.

Alas! if Love rose never from the dead.

Walter. Between him and the lady of his love There stood a wrinkled worldling.

And when she died,

The rivers of his heart ran all to waste;

They found no ocean; dry sands sucked them up.
Lady! he was a fool, a pitiful fool!

She said she loved him, would be dead in spring
She asked him but to stand beside her grave -
She said she would be daisies and she thought
"T would give her joy to feel that he was near.
She died, like music; and would you believe it?
He kept her foolish words within his heart,

As ceremonious as a chapel keeps

A relic of a saint. And in the spring

The doting idiot went.

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Walter. Laugh till your sides ache! oh, he went, poor fool,
But he found nothing, save red-trampled clay,

And a dull, sobbing rain. Do you not laugh?
Amid the comfortless rain he stood and wept;
Bareheaded in the mocking, pelting rain.
He might have known 't was ever so on earth.

Violet. You cannot laugh yourself, sir, nor can I.

Her unpolluted corse doth sleep in earth

Like a pure thought within a sinful soul.

Dearer is Earth to God for her sweet sake.

The issue and catastrophe of a new love-adventure here, in this unhappy and distempered period of baffled and disappointed ambition, and power struggling vainly for a vent, may be conjectured from the commencement of a scene, which perhaps might be more distinctly marked as the opening of the third part.

[A bridge in a City. Midnight. Walter alone.]
"Adam lost Paradise- eternal tale,
Repeated in the lives of all his sons.
I had a shining orb of happiness,

God
gave it me, but sin passed over it
As smallpox passes o'er a lovely face,
Leaving it hideous. I have lost for ever
The paradise of young and happy thoughts,
And now stand in the middle of my life
Looking back through my tears, ne'er to return.
I've a stern tryst with death, and must go on,
Though with slow steps and oft-reverted eyes.
"Tis a thick, rich-hazed, sumptuous autumn night;
The moon grows like a white flower in the sky;
The stars are dim. The tired year rests content
Among her sheaves, as a fond mother rests
Among her children-all her work is done,
There is a weight of peace upon the world;
It sleeps; God's blessing on it. Not on me.

Good men have said,

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That sometimes God leaves sinners to their sin, -
He has left me to mine, and I am changed;

My worst part is insurgent, and my will
Is weak and powerless as a trembling king
When millions rise up hungry. Woe is me!
My soul breeds sins as a dead body worms,
They swarm and feed upon me.

Three years appear to have gone by, when Walter, like a stag sore-hunted, returns to the home of his childhood.

""Twas here I spent my youth, as far removed
From the great heavings, hopes and fears of man,

As unknown isle asleep in unknown seas.
Gone my pure heart, and with it happy days;
No manna falls around me from on high,
Barely from off the desert of my life.
I gather patience and severe content.
God is a worker. He has thickly strewn
Infinity with grandeur. God is Love;
He yet shall wipe away creation's tears,
And all the worlds shall summer in his smile.
Why work I not. The veriest mote that sports
Its one-day life within the sunny beam,
Has its stern duties. Wherefore have I none?
I will throw off this dead and useless past,
As a strong runner, straining for his life,
Unclasps a mantle to the hungry winds.
A mighty purpose rises large and slow
From out the fluctuations of my soul,

As ghostlike from the dim and trembling sea
Starts the completed moon.

Here, in this determination, he writes his poem,

attains in this spirit the object which had formerly been his ambition. And here, in the last scene, we find him happy, or peaceful at least, with Violet.

"Violet. I always pictured you in such a place

Writing your book, and hurrying on, as if

You had a long and wondrous tale to tell,

And felt Death's cold hand closing round your heart.
Walter. Have you read my book?

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When I was dwelling by the moaning sea,

Your name was blown to me on every wind,

And I was glad; for by that sign I knew

You had fulfilled your heart, and hoped you would

Put off the robes of sorrow, and put on

The singing crown of Fame."

Again, below, she resumes,

"Walter! dost thou believe
Love will redeem all errors? Oh, my friend,
This gospel saves you! doubt it, you are lost.
Deep in the mists of sorrow long I lay,
Hopeless and still, when suddenly this truth
Like a slant sunbeam quivered through the mist,
And turned it into radiance. In the light
I wrote these words, while you were far away,
Fighting with shadows. Oh, Walter, in one boat.
We floated o'er the smooth, moon-silvered sea;
The sky was smiling with its orbs of bliss;
And while we lived within each other's eyes,
We struck and split, and all the world was lost
In one wild whirl of horror darkening down.
At last I gained a deep and silent isle,
Moaned on by a dim sea, and wandered round,
Week after week, the happy-mournful shore,
Wondering if you had 'scaped.

Thou noble soul,

Walter.
Teach me, if thou art nearer God than I!
My life was one long dream; when I awoke,
Duty stood like an angel in my path,
And seemed so terrible, I could have turned
Into my yesterdays, and wandered back
To distant childhood, and gone out to God
By the gate of birth, not death. Lift, lift me up
By thy sweet inspiration, as the tide

Lifts up a stranded boat upon the beach.

I will go forth 'mong men, not mailed in scorn,

But in the armor of a pure intent.

Great duties are before me, and great songs,
And whether crowned or crownless, when I fall,
It matters not, so as God's work is done.
I've learned to prize the quiet lightning deed,
Not the applauding thunder at its heels,
Which men call Fame. Our night is past;
We stand in precious sunrise; and beyond,
A long day stretches to the very end."

So be it, O young Poet; Poet, perhaps it is early to affirm; but so be it, at any rate, O young man. While you go forth in that "armor of pure intent," the hearts of some readers, be assured, will go with you.

Empedocles on Etna and other Poems, with its earlier companion volume, The Strayed Reveller and other Poems, are, it would seem, the productions (as is, or was, the English phrase) of a scholar and a gentleman; a man who has received a refined education, seen refined "society," and been more, we dare say, in the world, which is called the world, than in all likelihood has a Glasgow mechanic. More refined, therefore, and more highly educated sensibilities, too delicate, are they, for common service?-a calmer judgment also, a more poised and steady intellect, the siccum lumen of the soul; a finer and rarer aim perhaps, and certainly a keener sense of difficulty, in life; these are the characteristics of him whom we are to call "A." Empedocles, the sublime Sicilian philosopher, the fragments of whose moral and philosophic poems testify to his genius and character, — Empedocles, in the Poem before us, weary of misdirected effort, weary of imperfect thought, impatient of a life which appears to him a miserable failure, and incapable, as he conceives, of doing any thing that shall be true to that proper interior self,

"Being one with which we are one with the whole world,"

wandering forth, with no determined purpose, into the mountain solitudes, followed for a while by Pausanias, the eager and laborious physician, and at a distance by Callicles, the boymusician, flings himself at last, upon a sudden impulse and apparent inspiration of the intellect, into the boiling crater of Etna; rejoins there the elements. "Slave of sense," he was saying, pondering near the verge,

"Slave of sense

I have in no wise been: but slave of thought?
And who can say, he has been always free,
Lived ever in the light of his own soul?

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