"Away, away, my steed and I,
Upon the pinions of the wind,
All human dwellings left behind;
We sped like meteors through the sky,
When with its crackling sound the night
Is chequer'd with the northern light:
Town-village-none were on our track,
But a wild plain of far extent,
And bounded by a forest black;

And, save the scarce seen battlement
On distant heights of some strong hold,
Against the Tartars built of old,
No trace of man. The year before
A Turkish army had march'd o'er ;
And where the Spahi's hoof had trod,
The verdure flies the bloody sod:-
The sky was dull, and dim, and gray,
And a low breeze crept moaning by-
I could have answer'd with a sigh-
But fast we fled, away, away-
And I could neither sigh nor pray;
And my cold sweat-drops fell like rain
Upon the courser's bristling mane;
But, snorting still with rage and fear,
He flew upon his far career :
At times almost thought, indeed,
He must have slacken'd in his speed;
But no-my bound and slender frame
Was nothing to his angry might,
And merely like a spur became :
Each motion which I made to free
My swoln limbs from their agony

Increased his fury and affright:

I tried my voice,-'twas faint and low,
But yet he swerved as from a blow;
And, starting to each accent, sprang
As from a sudden trumpet's clang:
Meantime my cords were wet with gore,
Which, oozing through my limbs, ran o'er;
And in my tongue the thirst became
A something fierier far than flame."

pp. 25, 26.

And wore my feelings out before I well could count their causes o'er : And what with fury, fear, and wrath, The tortures which beset my path, Cold, hunger, sorrow, shame, distress, Thus bound in nature's nakedness; Sprung from a race whose rising blood When stirr'd beyond its calmer mood, And trodden hard upon, is like The rattle-snake's, in act to strike, What marvel if this worn-out trunk Beneath its woes a moment sunk? The earth gave way, the skies roll'd round, I seem'd to sink upon the ground; But err'd, for I was fastly bound. My heart turn'd sick, my brain grew sore, And throbb'd awhile, then beat no more: The skies spun like a mighty wheel; I saw the trees like drunkards reel, And a slight flash sprang o'er my eyes, Which saw no farther: he who dies Can die no more than then I died. O'ertortured by that ghastly ride, I felt the blackness come and go,

And strove to wake; but could not
make

My senses climb up from below:
I felt as on a plank at sea,

When all the waves that dash o'er thee,
At the same time upheave and whelm,
And hurl thee towards a desert realm.
My undulating life was as

The fancied lights that flitting pass
Our shut eyes in deep midnight, when
Fever begins upon the brain;
But soon it pass'd, with little pain,

But a confusion worse than such :
I own that I should deem it much,
Dying, to feel the same again;
And yet I do suppose we must
Feel far more ere we turn to dust:
No matter; I have bared my brow
Full in Death's face-before-and now.'
pp. 30-32.

Then follows his waking from his bright river," through which the wild trance by the freshness of that "broad steed dashed so fiercely,-and his landon that unknown and silent shore," "

tions.

"And I was then not what I seem, But headlong as a wintry stream,

"Where all behind was dark and drear, And all before was night and fear."

There is some forbearance required to resist the temptation of making more quotations than our allotted bounds will allow, especially as we without excluding some other that cannot select any portion of the poem has an equal claim to our admiration. We pass over the fine and affecting picture of the noble animal's exhausted strength and growing faintness, and even the dawn of that day, which,

"Rose crimson, and deposed the stars, And call'd the radiance from their cars, And fill'd the earth, from his deep throne, With lonely lustre, all his own."-p. 36.

The only adventure these inseparable travellers met with on their way was one likely enough to happen, where it did, but never could have happened in any other place, nor, under any other circumstances, could have produced such singular results. There is no resisting the desire to extract it.

"Is it the wind those branches stirs ? No, no! from out the forest prance

A trampling troop; I see them come! In one vast squadron they advance!

I strove to cry-my lips were dumb.
The steeds rush on in plunging pride;
But where are they the reins to guide?
A thousand horse-and none to ride!
With flowing tail, and flying mane,
Wide nostrils-never stretch'd by pain,
Mouths bloodless to the bit or rein,
And feet that iron never shod,
And flanks unscarr'd by spur or rod.
A thousand horse, the wild, the free,
Like waves that follow o'er the sea,

Came thickly thundering on,
As if our faint approach to meet ;
The sight re-nerved my courser's feet,
A moment staggering, feebly fleet,
A moment, with a faint low neigh,

He answer'd, and then fell ;
With gasps and glazing eyes he lay,
And reeking limbs immoveable,

His first and last career is done!
On came the troop-they saw him stoop,
They saw me strangely bound along
His back with many a bloody thong:
They stop-they start-they snuff the air,
Gallop a moment here and there,
Approach, retire, wheel round and round,
Then plunging back with sudden bound,
Headed by one black mighty steed,
Who seem'd the patriarch of his breed,
Without a single speck or hair
Of white upon his shaggy hide;
They snort-they foam-neigh-swerve
aside,

And backward to the forest fly,
By instinct, from a human eye:—
They left me there, to my despair,
Link'd to the dead and stiffening wretch."
pp. 37, 38.

We regret leaving out two stanzas of great interest, containing the Hetman's reflections on the seeming approach of death, and the horribly picturesque advance and retreat of the raven who hovered over him expecting her prey. His fainting again is a

closes the narrative; where, awaking, he finds himself once more under a roof and stretched upon a bed, where "A slender girl, long-hair'd, and tall, Sate watching by the cottage wall; Even with my first return of thought; The sparkle of her eye I caught, For ever and anon she threw

A prying, pitying glance on me
With her black eyes so wild and free:
I gazed, and gazed, until I knew
No vision it could be,--

But that I lived, and was released
From adding to the vulture's feast:
And when the Cossack maid beheld
My heavy eyes at length unseal'd,
She smiled and I essay'd to speak,
But fail'd-and she approach'd, and
made

With lip and finger signs that said,
I must not strive as yet to break
The silence, till my strength should be
Enough to leave my accents free;
And then her hand on mine she laid,
And smooth'd the pillow for my head,
And stole along on tiptoe tread,

And gently oped the door, and spake
In whispers ne'er was voice so sweet!
Even music follow'd her light feet."

pp. 43, 44.

Certainly never was mere corporal suffering prolonged to such extent in the same intense degree, or presented to the mind in a form creative of so deep an interest. It is, however, an experiment we should not wish to see repeated. Our own country furnishes a story of prolonged torture inflicted on a noble culprit, the doom of peculiar guilt, and aggrandized by the rank and character of the illustrious and accomplished prince, who was the subject of a crime so horribly expiated. The Earl of Athol, the assassin of James I. may possibly, in consequence of the success of Mazeppa, be brought alive to our excited imaginations, thus rendering us familiar to those horrors from which we were wont to turn with abhorrence when recorded in the sober page of history, and then we shall have Ravillac and Damien presented to us by paltry imitators, and be cured of our taste for torture by a glut of bad poetry.

We proceed reluctantly to a brief notice of what we cannot see without regret, a poem from Lord Byron, in which he tells us, in dull and inharmonious verse, what he has told us before more happily in another place. This reiterated querulous lament over

the most haughty, vindictive, and unprincipled of republics, where the jealousy and cruelty of the government, and the utter profligacy of the people seemed long to call down the vengeance which has overtaken that emporium of pride and luxury; this loud lament that resounds like the infernal Cocytus through all our. coasts, does not proceed from love to this deservedly debased republic. Why should we suppose any one to love earth and stones, canals and gondolas, who openly professes disdain and hatred of his fellow men? No, it is not love of any kind, but hatred of all, that a good or even a great man should love that has given birth to this inferior production. His unmanly groans over those who unresisting met the fate that they so well deserved, serve merely as a prelude to the malignity which he pours out from a very full cup on that country, which his inconsistent self a few months ago boasted of and eulogized in his happiest manner.

But I was born where men are proud to be, The inviolate island of the sage and free.

The poison he offers to his countrymen is rank and deadly, but he has not allured them by presenting it in a golden goblet. The vehicle in which it is contained is worthy of the contents, and both unworthy of the author's genius,-to say nothing of his principles.

This is followed by a story in prose about a gentleman who, once fat and fair, and gay and debonair, became of a sudden sad and sorrowful, and lean and pale, and would not, or could not, tell why. But, determined he was, out of reverence it should seem, to the Chaste huntress of the woods," to die in her long hallowed precincts. Arrived among the columns of her prostrate temple, he inquired the day of the month, and on hearing it was the ninth, made such preparations for death as are common to all Lord Byron's heroes. If he had doubts before, he was confirmed, by seeing a stork with a snake in its bill, no uncommon sight, one should suppose, where storks are sent by an invisible instinct to destroy the redundance of reptiles produced in a desolated country. This wonder is succeeded by another. The dying hero of the tale actually desires his

attendant to bring him water, and expresses this desire in two Turkish words ;-then he makes his friend swear a most terrible oath to conceal his death. Now the most wonderful circumstance suggested by all this tale of wonders is, that this friend, after binding himself to secrecy by this fearful oath, should not only communicate what he had sworn so bitterly to conceal, to his friend in Albemarle Street, but through his medium to the public at large. Among others of his friend's secrets, we are told of a ring to be thrown into the salt springs of Eleusis; after that he must wait one hour in the Temple of Ceres; and what then?-Nothing. Now, it requires no small degree of contempt for the thinking public to tell such a story gravely to grown persons. But we are apt to suppose his lordship might have written this fragment for the amusement of

"Ada, sole daughter of his house and heart;"

the same enclosure with the Venetian and that Mr Murray, finding it under poem, mistook its destination, and printed it with the rest.

ORIGINAL LETTER OF MR BURCKHARDT, THE TRAVELLER.

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We have pleasure in presenting to our readers an original letter from Mr Burckhardt, the traveller, to a lady in this country. Mr Burckhardt is probably now well known as one of the most eminent among those whom an untimely death has interrupted in the attempt to penetrate into the inte rior of Africa. He was a native of Zurich, and a cadet of one of the principal families of Switzerland. Inspired by the success of Park's first attempt, he came over to London, with an introduction to Sir Joseph Banks, and offered his services to the African Association. Under their auspices, he left England on the 2d March 1809, and arrived at Aleppo. He spent three years there and at Damascus, visiting Palmyra and Balbec, living among the Turkmans in the north of Syria, and among the Bedouins of the desert. He thus acquir ed a perfect knowledge of Mahommedan manners, which would have admirably qualified him for the great

journey he was about to undertake. Between June and September 1812, he went from Damascus to Cairo, by the coast of the Jordan, and through Arabia Petræa. Being repeatedly disappointed of the caravan with which he intended to set out, he spent the intervals in making two journeys into Upper Egypt, one up the Nile to the frontier of Dongola, the other to Souakem and Jidda, on the coast of the Red Sea. He also visited, in the character of a Mahometan pilgrim, the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and finally made an excursion from Cairo to Mount Sinai. At length, when he was on the point of setting out upon the great expedition to which these minor excursions were only preparatory, he was seized with a dysentery, and died at Cairo on the 5th October 1817, after ten days illness. Although Mr Burckhardt was thus fatally disappointed as to the main object of his ambition, the accounts left behind him of the various countries through which he had already travelled are said to be such as will secure him a high place among modern travellers. The following letter, therefore, written on the near prospect of his departure for this perilous mission, will not, we think, be perused without interest.

TO MRS H C

MADAM,

I felt much ashamed at the perusal of your last letter, which I received but a few days ago, upon my return to town from a short summer excursion. You are kind enough to suppose some casualties which might have excused my silence upon the former letter, while I myself am almost at a loss how to apologise for that delay; for, telling you that my time has been entirely devoted to my present pursuits is no excuse. Time, you will think, seldom runs so fast as to preclude such friendly offices and duties. Yet this is my only plea, and I confess candidly, that, if you'll accept of it, I shall still be under great obliga

tions to you.

The letter you sent me, for Kaifsaro, is now, inclosed in one of mine, in the hands of the Russian chaplain, the Rev. Mr Smirner, 36, Harley Street. He promised to forward it to

VOL. V.

Petersburg as soon as possible, and I dare say it will not be four months before it reaches the owner. I have heard nothing of the two gentlemen since their arrival at Paris. I fancied them by this time in Swisserland, but the latest letters, written in August, which I had from home, do not mention their arrival. I think it very probable that the appearing symptoms of a new Continental war may have hastened their return to Petersburg, and it is from thence that I now expect to hear from them.

I have passed the greatest part of last summer at Cambridge, where I met with much good reception and civility. My departure from this country has been retarded: I think it will not take place till the end of November, and, in the interval, I must make the best of my time. It is not, as you suppose, Madam, to rejoin my family and my native country that I go abroad; I am about to set out upon an expedition which lies rather out of the route of common travels, and which may, perhaps, be of some interest to you, as several of your countrymen have sacrificed their labours to the same purpose. I mean to try anew to pierce into the interior parts of Africa, and am supported in the execution of this plan by the same society that patronized Mr Park. Our friends in vain attempted to dissuade me from the undertaking; it is upon mature deliberation, and not unacquainted with localities, that I have formed my resolution, and I trust I shall keep firm to it. I should not have mentioned this to you, Madam, not wishing to anticipate claims of merit before I shall have deserved them; yet I thought that your expressing a desire to hear of me in future was entitling me to tell you what my present pursuits were. They are, as you may well see, of such a nature as to render the kind remembrance of my friends doubly valuable to me. I hope, therefore, not to beg in vain in desiring you to couple sometimes my memory with that of our friends, and to renew it by looking over the map, on hearing the accounts that may, perhaps, reach this country of the progress of my journey. It will be of the most heartfelt satisfaction to me to think, that, even in this country, I shall leave some friends whose good wishes not only attend the success of

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