After closing the volume, he turns its contents over in his mind, and gradually falls into a fit of musing on the fickleness of fortune, the vicissitudes of his own life, and the evils that had overtaken him even in his tender youth. Suddenly he hears the bell ringing to matins; but its sound chiming in with his melancholy fancies, seems to him like a voice exhorting him to write his story. In the spirit of poetic errantry he determines to comply with this intimation: he therefore takes pen in hand, makes with it a sign of the cross to implore a benediction, and sallies forth into the fairy land of poetry. There is something extremely fanciful in all this, and it is interesting as furnishing a striking and beautiful instance of the simple manner in which whole trains of poetical thought are sometimes awakened, and literary enterprizes suggested to the mind.

In the course of his poem he more than once bewails the peculiar hardness of his fate; thus doomed to lonely and inactive life, and shut up from the freedom and pleasure of the world, in which the meanest animal indulges unrestrained. There is a sweetness however

in his very complaints; they are the lamentations of an amiable and social spirit at being denied the indulgence of its kind and generous propensities; there is nothing in them harsh or exaggerated; they flow with a natural and touching pathos, and are perhaps rendered more touching by their simple brevity. They contrast finely with those elaborate and iterated repinings, which we sometimes meet with in poetry;-the effusions of morbid minds sickening under miseries of their own creating, and venting their bitterness upon an unoffending world. James speaks of his privations with acute sensibility, but having mentioned them passes on, as if his manly mind disdained to brood over unavoidable calamities. When such a spirit breaks forth into complaint, however brief, we are aware how great must be the suffering that extorts the murmur. We sympathize with James, a romantic, active, and accomplished prince, cut off in the lustihood of youth from all the enterprize, the noble uses, and vigorous delights of life; as we do with Milton, alive to all the beauties of nature and glories of art, when he breathes forth

brief, but deep-toned lamentations over his perpetual blindness.

Had not James evinced a deficiency of poetic artifice, we might almost have suspected that these lourings of gloomy reflection were meant as preparative to the brightest scene of his story; and to contrast with that effulgence of light and loveliness, that exhilarating accompaniment of bird and song, and foliage and flower, and all the revel of the year, with which he ushers in the lady of his heart. It is this scene, in particular, which throws all the magic of romance about the old castle keep. He had risen, he says, at daybreak, according to custom, to escape from the dreary meditations of a sleepless pillow. « Bewailing in his chamber thus alone,» despairing of all joy and remedy, « fortired of thought and wo-begone,» he had wandered to the window, to indulge the captive's miserable solace of gazing wistfully upon the world from which he is excluded. The window looked forth upon a small garden which lay at the foot of the It was a quiet, sheltered spot, adorned with arbours and green alleys, and pro

tower.

tected from the passing gaze by trees and haw

thorn hedges.

Now was there made, fast by the tower's wall,

A garden faire, and in the corners set
An arbour green with wandis long and small
Railed about, and so with leaves beset
Was all the place and hawthorn hedges knet,

That lyf (a) was none, walkyng there forbye,
That might within scarce any wight espye.
So thick the branches and the leves grene,

Beshaded all the alleys that there were,
And midst of every arbour might be sene

The sharpe, grene, sweet juniper,
Growing so fair, with branches here and there,
That as it seemed to a lyf without,

The boughs did spread the arbour all about.

And on the small grene twistis (b) set

The lytel swete nightingales, and sung
So loud and clear, the hymnis consecrate

Of lovis use, now soft, now loud among,
That all the garden and the wallis rung
Right of their song—-

It was the month of May, when every thing was in bloom; and he interprets the song of

(a) Lyf, person.

(b) Twistis, small boughs or twigs. Note. The language of the quotations is generally modernized.

the nightingale into the language of his enamoured feeling:

Worship, all ye that lovers be, this May;

For of your bliss the kalends are begun,

And sing with us, away, winter away,

season.

Come, summer come, the sweet season and sun.

As he gazes on the scene, and listens to the notes of the birds, he gradually lapses into one of those tender and undefinable reveries, which fill the youthful bosom in this delicious He wonders what this love may be, of which he has so often read, and which thus seems breathed forth in the quickening breath of May, and melting all nature into ecstasy and song. If it really be so great a felicity, and if it be a boon thus generally dispensed to the most insignificant of beings, why is he alone cut off from its enjoyments?

Oft would I think, O Lord, what may this be,
That love is of such noble myght and kynde?

Loving his folke, and such prosperitee

Is it of him, as we in books do find:

May he oure hertes setten (a) and unbynd :

Hath he upon our hertes such maistrye?
Or is all this but feynit fantasye?

(a) Setten, incline.