For adoration all the ranks

Of angels yield eternal thanks,

And David in the midst;

With God's good poor, which, last and least In man's esteem, thou to thy feast,

O blessed bridegroom, bidst.

For adoration seasons change,

And order, truth, and beauty range,
Adjust, attract, and fill:

The grass the polyanthus checks;
And polished porphyry reflects,
By the descending rill.

Rich almonds colour to the prime
For adoration; tendrils climb,

And fruit-trees pledge their gems;
And Ivis with her gorgeous vest
Builds for her eggs her cunning nest,
And bell-flowers bow their stems.

*

Sweet is the dew that falls betimes,
And drops upon the leafy limes;
Sweet Hermon's fragrant air:
Sweet is the lily's silver bell,

And sweet the wakeful tapers smell

That watch for early prayer.

Sweet the young nurse with love intense,
Which smiles o'er sleeping innocence;

Sweet when the lost arrive :

Sweet the musician's ardour beats,

While his vague mind's in quest of sweets, The choicest flowers to hive.

1 The humming bird.

Sweeter in all the strains of love
The language of thy turtle dove

Paired to thy swelling chord ;
Sweeter with every grace endued
The glory of thy gratitude
Respired unto the Lord.

Strong is the horse upon his speed; Strong in pursuit the rapid glede,1 Which makes at once his game: Strong the tall ostrich on the ground; Strong thro' the turbulent profound Shoots xiphias2 to his aim.

Strong is the lion-like a coal
His eyeball-like a bastion's mole
His chest against the foes;
Strong, the gier-eagle on his sail,
Strong against tide th' enormous whale
Emerges as he goes.

But stronger still, in earth and air,
And in the sea, the man of prayer;
And far beneath the tide ;

And in the seat to faith assigned,
Where ask is have, where seek is find,
Where knock is open wide.

Beauteous the fleet before the gale; Beauteous the multitudes in mail, Ranked arms and crested heads: Beauteous the garden's umbrage mild, Walk, water, meditated wild,

And all the bloomy beds.

Beauteous the moon full on the lawn;
And beauteous, when the veil's withdrawn,
The virgin to her spouse:

Beauteous the temple decked and filled,
When to the heaven of heavens they build
Their heart-directed vows.

Beauteous, yea beauteous more than these, The shepherd-king upon his knees

For his momentous trust; With wish of infinite conceit,

For man, beast, mute, the small and great, And prostrate dust to dust.

Precious the bounteous widow's mite;
And precious, for extreme delight,

The largess from the churl :
Precious the ruby's blushing blaze,
And alba's1 blest imperial rays,
And pure cerulean pearl.

Precious the penitential tear;
And precious is the sigh sincere,
Acceptable to God:

And precious are the winning flowers,
In gladsome Israel's feast of bowers,
Bound on the hallowed sod.

More precious that diviner part
Of David, even the Lord's own heart,
Great, beautiful, and new;

In all things where it was intent,
In all extremes, in each event
Proof-answering true to true.

1 Rev. xxi. 11 (?)

Glorious the sun in mid career;

Glorious th' assembled fires appear;
Glorious the comet's train :

Glorious the trumpet and alarm;

Glorious th' almighty stretched-out arm; Glorious th' enraptured main :

Glorious the northern lights astream; Glorious the song, when God's the theme; Glorious the thunder's roar :

Glorious hosanna from the den;

Glorious the catholic amen;
Glorious the martyr's gore:

Glorious-more glorious is the crown
Of Him that brought salvation down,
By meekness call'd thy Son;
Thou at stupendous truth believed,
And now the matchless deed's achieved,
Determined, dared, and done.

WILLIAM FALCONER.

[BORN 11th of February, 1732; lost with the crew of the Aurora, last heard of on 27th December, 1769, at the Cape of Good Hope. The Shipwreck was published in 1762.]

In the Gentleman's Magazine for December, 1755, appeared a versified complaint, On the Uncommon Scarcity of Poetry, by a Sailor. The scarcity still prevailed when seven years later a sailor—the same perhaps who had written the complaint-startled English readers by his discovery of a new epic theme. The Muse, as Falconer imagines her, visits him in no olive-grove, or flowery lawn, but in a glimmering cavern beside the sea; his lyre is tuned to

The long surge that foams through yonder cave,
Whose vaults remurmur to the roaring wave.'

There was largeness, and freedom and force in the subject he had chosen; and what is best in his treatment of it was learnt direct from the waves and winds. No one before Falconer had conceived or told in English poetry the long and passionate combat between the sea, roused to fury, and its slight but dexterous rival, with the varying fortunes of the strife. He had himself, like his Arion, been wrecked near Cape Colonna, on the coast of Greece; like Arion, he was one of three who reached the shore and lived. For the material of his brief epic he needed but to revive in his imagination the sights, the sounds, the fears, the hopes, the efforts of five days the most eventful and the most vivid of his life. The Shipwreck is not a descriptive poem ; it is a poem of action; each buffet of the sea, each swift turning of the wheel is a portion of the attack or the defence; and as the catastrophe draws near, as the ship scuds past Falconera, as the hills of Greece