5. The bard wept-in his palms Like a banner in battle; The foam mingled with fire. 6. O spare sunny Scalholt, And pleasant old Hola! For the deep sea came dashing; The green hill was cleft, And its fires came flashing. But matron and maiden Shall long look, in sorrow, To dread Hecla, and sing thus The sad song of Snorro. "The maiden, concluding her song, laid aside her harp, and retired to her devotions. A chill rough wind came over the Greenland sea; the snow flakes fell thick and fast, and a mantle of frozen snow, deep and dazzling, and equal to the weight of an active hunter, covered mountain and vale, and the habitations of men, in the first forty-eight hours of darkness. All that was visible, for months, was the radiance of the moon, and stars, and streamers; and the currents of dark smoke from the house tops, curling on the wind, or staining the white and trackless waste. All that was heard was the din of the dancer's heel, the sound of the minstrel's song, and the hymn, prolonged and holy, ascending from the domestic circle round the glowing hearth. A ruder sound sometimes greeted our ears-the moan of the storm, the chafing of the sea waves on cliff and headland, the sharp and melancholy cry of the polar bear, as he roamed hungering for food over the desert waste, and smelled in the wind the abodes of men-and not unfrequently his groans in the deathpang under the huntsman's spear. At last, the wind waxed softer and milder, the stars and streamers became dimmer, the sea-fowls began to move their wings, conscious of coming day, and the wild animals of the waste turned to a faint gleam of livelier light, which, ascending from the ocean, tinged half a quarter of heaven. At length the light gathered strength-a brighter and broader beam shot into the sky, and glowed along the waters, the red edge of the returning sun fairly rose above the wave, and a sharp and level beam glimmered on cliff and promontory, and glowed redder still midway down the steep and shaggy mountain of Snaefiels, with its head stooped over the ocean, and its top sparkling with icicles, and white with eternal and untrodden snow. Man, and bird, and beast, welcomed the sun with a shout and a hail-the poet's song-the song of the bird, and the scarcely less melodious cry of the household dog, softened into music by delight and joy, gave greeting to a luminary, which, without a profane or idolatrous feeling, obtains the reverence, and something like adoration, of the people of Iceland. Peace be with them :- a bark from my native land wafted me away, half unwillingly, from a land which I was fortuned never to behold again." NALLA THE MANIAC. 1. To see the human mind o'erturn'd,— And Reason's lamp, which brightly burn'd, 2. It is a painful, humbling thought- 3. To-day he sits on Reason's throne, 4. Yet think not, though forlorn and drear Than these sad records have rehears'd: 5. There are before whose mental eye 'Till gathering clouds-in awful night Have quench'd each beam of heavenly light. 6. There are-whose mental ear has heard The "still small voice!" yet, prone to wrong, Have proudly, foolishly preferr'd The sophist's creed, the syren's song ;And staked, upon a desperate throw, Their hopes above,-their peace below. 7. There are, in short, whose days present Who hourly for themselves invent Fresh conflicts ;-'till this dream of Life Has made their throbbing bosoms ache, And yet, alas! they fear to wake. 8. With their's compared, the Maniac's doom, 9. O THOU! whose cause they both espouse, The dark'ning clouds of madness roll. BERNARD BARTON. LETTERS TO A YOUNG MAN WHOSE EDUCATION HAS BEEN NEGLECTED. BY THE AUTHOR OF THE CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. MY DEAR SIR,-When I had the pleasure of meeting you at Chfor the second time in my life, I was much concerned to remark the general dejection of your manner. I may now add, that I was also much surprized; your cousin's visit to me, having made it no longer a point of delicacy to suppress that feeling. General report had represented you as in possession of all which enters into the worldly estimate of happiness-great opulence, unclouded reputation, and freedom from unhappy connexions. That you had the priceless blessing of unfluctuating health, I know upon your own authority. And the concurring opinions of your friends, together with my own opportunities for observation, left me no room to doubt that you wanted not the last and weightiest among the sources of happiness - a fortunate constitution of mind, both for moral and intellectual ends. So many blessings as these, meeting in the person of one man, and yet all in some mysterious waydefeated and poisoned, presented a problem too interesting both to the selfish and the generous curiosity of men-to make it at all wonderful, that at that time and place you should have been the subject of much discussion. Now and then some solutions of the mystery were hazarded: in particular, I remember one from a young lady of seventeen, who said with a positive air, "That Mr. M's dejection was well known to arise from an unfortunate attachment in early life:" which assurance appeared to have great weight with some other young ladies of sixteen. But upon the whole, I think that no account of the matter was proposed at that time which satisfied myself, or was likely to satisfy any reflecting person, At length, the visit of your cousin L in his road to Th― has cleared up the mystery in a way more agreeable to myself than I could have ventured to anticipate from any communication short of that which should acquaint me with the entire dispersion of the dejection under which you laboured. I allow myself to call such a disclosure agreeable, partly upon this ground-that where the grief or dejection of our friends admits of no important alleviation, it is yet satisfactory to know, that it may be traced to causes of adequate dignity: and, in this particular case, I have not only that assurance, but the prospect of contributing some assistance to your emancipation from these depressing recollections by co-operating with your own efforts in the way you have pointed out for supplying the defects of your early education. L—— explained to me all that your own letter had left imperfect; in particular how it was that you came to be defrauded of the education to which even your earliest and humblest prospects had entitled you: by what heroic efforts, but how vainly, you laboured to repair that greatest of losses: what remarkable events concurred to raise you to your present state of prosperity; and all other circumstances which appeared necessary to put me fully in possession of your present wishes and intentions. The two questions, which you addressed to me through him, I have answered below: these were questions which I could answer easily and without meditation: but for the main subject of our future correspondence, it is so weighty, and demands such close at tention (as even I find, who have revolved the principal points almost daily for many years), that I would willingly keep it wholly distinct from the hasty letter which I am now obliged to write; on which account it is that I shall forbear to enter at present upon the Series of Letters which I have promised, even if I should find that my time were not exhausted by the answers to your two questions below. To your first question,-whether to you, with your purposes and at your age of thirty-two, a residence at either of our English universitiesor at any foreign university, can be of much service?-my answer is firmly and unhesitatingly-no. The majority of the under-graduates of your own standing in an academic sense will be your juniors by twelve or fourteen years; a disparity of age which could not but make your society mutually burthensome. What then is it, that you would seek in a university? Lectures? These, whether public or private, are surely the very worst modes of acquiring any sort of accurate knowledge; and are just as much inferior to a good book on the same subject, as that book hastily read aloud, and then immediately withdrawn, would be inferior to the same book left in your possession, and open at any hour to be consulted, retraced, collated, and in the fullest sense studied. But, besides this, university lectures are naturally adapted not so much to the general purpose of communicating knowledge, as to the specific purpose of meeting a particular form of examination for degrees, and a particular profession to which the whole course of the education is known to be directed. The two single advantages which lectures can ever acquire to balance those which they forego-are either 1. the obvious one of a better apparatus for displaying illustrative experiments than most students can command; and the cases, where this becomes of importance it cannot be necessary to mention: 2. the advantage of a rhetorical delivery, when that is of any use (as in lectures on poetry, JAN. 1823. &c.) These, however, are advan tages more easily commanded in a great capital than in the most splendid university. What then remains to a university, except its libraries? And with regard to those the answer is short: to the greatest of them under-graduates have not free access: to the inferior ones (of their own college, &c.) the libraries of the great capitals are often equal or superior: and for mere purposes of study your own private library is far preferable to the Bodleian or the Vatican. To you, therefore, a university can offer no attractions except on the assumption that you see cause to adopt a profession: and, as a degree from some university would in that case be useful (and indispensable, except for the bar), your determination on this first question must still be dependent on that which you form upon the second. In this second question you call for my opinion upon the eleventh chapter of Mr. Coleridge's Biogra phia Literaria, as applied to the circumstances in which you yourself are placed. This chapter, to express its substance in the most general terms, is a dissuasion from what Herder, in a passage there quoted, calls Die Authorschaft; or, as Mr. Coleridge expresses it, "the trade of authorship:" and the amount of the advice is-that, for the sake of his own happiness and respectability, every man should adopt some trade or profession-and should make literature a subordinate pursuit. On this advice, I understand you to ask, 1. whether it is naturally to be interpreted, as extending to cases such as yours: and 2. if so, what is my judgment on such advice so extended? As to my judgment upon this advice, supposing it addressed to men of your age and situation, you will easily collect from all which I shall say that I think it as bad as can well be given. Waiving this, however, and to consider your other question-in what sense, and with what restrictions the whole chapter is to be interpreted; that is a point which I find it no easy matter to settle. Mr. Coleridge, who does not usually offend by laxity and indecision of purpose, has in this instance G |