The waves were white, and red the morn,
In the noisy hour when I was born!
And the whale it whistled, the porpoise roll'd,
And the dolphins bared their backs of gold;
And never was heard such an outery wild
As welcomed to life the ocean child!

I've lived since then, in calm and strife,
Full fifty summers a sailor's life,

With wealth to spend and a power to range,
But never have sought, nor sigh'd for change;
And death, whenever he comes to me,
Shall come on the wild unbounded sea!

THE STORMY PETREL.

A thousand miles from land are we,
Tossing about on the roaring sea;
From billow to bounding billow cast,
Like fleecy snow on the stormy blast;
The sails are scatter'd abroad, like weeds,
The strong masts shake like quivering reeds,
The mighty cables, and iron chains,

The hull, which all earthly strength disdains,
They strain and they crack, and hearts like stone
Their natural hard, proud strength disown.

Up and down! Up and down!

From the base of the wave to the billow's crown,

And amid the flashing and feathery foam

The stormy Petrel finds a home

A home, if such a place may be,

For her who lives on the wide wide sea,
On the craggy ice, in the frozen air,

And only seeketh her rocky lair

To warm her young, and to teach them spring

At once o'er the waves on their stormy wing!

O'er the deep! O'er the deep!

Where the whale and the shark and the sword-fish sleep, Outflying the blast and the driving rain,

The Petrel telleth her tale-in vain,

For the mariner curseth the warning bird

Who bringeth him news of the storms unheard!
Ah! thus does the prophet, of good or ill,

Meet hate from the creatures he serveth still!

Yet he ne'er falters :-So, Petrel! spring
Once more o'er the waves on thy stormy wing!

THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

THOMAS DE QUINCEY, the author of the celebrated "Confessions of an English Opium Eater," has treated the events of his early life in a manner which makes that subject for ever his own. Though possessed of a very extensive knowledge of German literature, his style, so far from being Germanized, is eminently English-masculine, clear, and logical. He has written much for various periodical publications, and contributed several masterly articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Metaphysical discussion, philosophical criticism, and biography are the classes of subjects in which Mr. De Quincey excels; though at times he exhibits such extravagances of opinion as we should think, from his usual good sense, he could not be guilty of, unless under the influence of his early and longcherished friend-"opium." Witness his essay on Pope, in which he most unjustly depreciates that great poet; and his remarks on Wordsworth so extravagantly, if not absurdly eulogistic. The following extracts, however, present specimens of his best manner-the former of his able and astute criticism, the latter of his lively and graphic description:

THE KNOCKING AT THE GATE, (IN MACBETH.)

From my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth. It was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account. The effect was, that it reflected back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity; yet, however obstinately I endeavored with my understanding to

For instance, he says:-"Meditative poetry is perhaps that which will finally maintain most power upon generations more thoughtful; and in this department, at least, there is little competition to be apprehended by Wordsworth from any thing that has appeared since the death of Shakspeare!" Such extravagant, if not absurd eulogy of a poet, defeats its own end. As if Milton, (shade of the world's great bard, pardon the profane IF!) as if Milton, Young, Cowper, Collins, Akenside, Gray, Pollok, Coleridge, and a host of others, had written no "meditative poetry." Besides, our critic goes upon the certainly false assumption, that the time will come when meditative poetry will take the highest rank. This never will, never can be, till the nature of man is changed. Man is not all "meditation." He loves, indeed, at times to "meditate," but he also loves to be moved. He has a soul as well as a mind. He has a heart to feel, sympathies to be excited, admiration to be aroused, tears to shed. His fancy is to be warmed, his imagination to be kindled by the magic touch of the poet's pen. Man, too, has taste; has a sense of the beautiful, the tender, the grand; and that poet who takes the deepest and strongest hold upon the HEART, who excites the feelings of pity, of love, or of admiration; who inspires the soul with the feeling of the grand, the territic, the sublime; who shows the power of the true poet, (the MAKER,) giving "to airy nothing a local habitation and a name,"-he it is who will be most read and loved and admired while the world lasts.

comprehend this, for many years I never could see why it should produce such an effect.

Here I pause for one moment, to exhort the reader never to pay any attention to his understanding when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind. The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind, and the most to be distrusted; and yet the great majority of people trust to nothing else; which may do for ordinary life, but not for philosophical purposes.

My understanding could furnish no reason why the knocking at the gate in Macbeth should produce any effect, direct or reflected. In fact, my understanding said positively that it could not produce any effect. But I knew better: I felt that it did; and I waited and clung to the problem until further knowledge should enable me to solve it. At length I solved it to my own satisfaction; and my solution is this. Murder in ordinary cases, where the sympathy is wholly directed to the case of the murdered person, is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror; and for this reason, that it flings the interest exclusively upon the natural but ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life; an instinct which, as being indispensable to the primal law of self-preservation, is the same in kind, (though different in degree,) amongst all living creatures; this instinct, therefore, because it annihilates all distinctions, and degrades the greatest of men to the level of "the poor beetle that we tread on," exhibits human nature in its most abject and humiliating attitude. Such an attitude would little suit the purposes of the poet. What, then, must he do? He must throw the interest on the murderer. Our sympathy must be with him; (of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings and are made to understand them-not a sympathy of pity or approbation.) In the murdered person all strife of thought, all flux and reflux of passion and of purpose, are crushed by one overwhelming panic: the fear of instant death smites him "with its petrific mace." But in the murderer-such a murderer as a poet will condescend to, there must be raging some great storm of passion-jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred-which will create a hell within him; and into this hell we are to look.

In Macbeth, for the sake of gratifying his own enormous and teeming faculty of creation, Shakspeare has introduced two murderers; and, as usual in his hands, they are remarkably discriminated; but, though in Macbeth the strife of mind is greater than

1 It seems almost ludicrous to guard and explain my use of a word in a situation where it would naturally explain itself. But it has become necessary to do so, in consequence of the unscholarlike use of the word sympathy, at present so general, by which, instead of taking it in its proper sense, as the act of reproducing in our minds the feelings of another, whether for hatred, indignation, love, pity, or approbation, it is made a mere synonyme of the word pity; and hence, instead of saying "sympathy with another," many writers adopt the mon strous barbarism of "sympathy for another."

in his wife, the tiger spirit not so awake, and his feelings caught chiefly by contagion from her,-yet, as both were finally involved in the guilt of murder, the murderous mind of necessity is finally to be presumed in both. This was to be expressed; and on its own account, as well as to make it a more proportionable antagonist to the unoffending nature of their victim, "the gracious Duncan," and adequately to expound "the deep damnation of his taking off,”— this was to be expressed with peculiar energy. We were to be made to feel that the human nature, i. e. the divine nature of love and mercy, spread through the hearts of all creatures, and seldom utterly withdrawn from man, was gone, vanished, extinct; and that the fiendish nature had taken its place. And, as this effect is marvellously accomplished in the dialogues and soliloquies themselves, so it is finally consummated by the expedient under consideration; and it is to this that I now solicit the reader's attention. If the reader has ever witnessed a wife, daughter, or sister in a fainting fit, he may chance to have observed that the most affecting moment in such a spectacle, is that in which a sigh and a stirring announce the recommencement of suspended life. Or, if the reader has ever been present in a vast metropolis on the day when some great national idol was carried in funeral pomp to his grave, and chancing to walk near the course through which it passed, has felt powerfully, in the silence and desertion of the streets, and in the stagnation of ordinary business, the deep interest which at that moment was possessing the heart of man,-if all at once he should hear the deathlike stillness broken up by the sound of wheels rattling away from the scene, and making known that the transitory vision was dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment was his sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and affecting, as at that moment when the suspension ceases and the goings-on of human life are suddenly resumed. All action in any direction is best expounded, measured, and made apprehensible, by reaction. Now apply this to the case in Macbeth. Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart and the entrance of the fiendish heart was to be expressed and made sensible. Another world has stepped in; and the murderers are taken out of the region of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured: Lady Macbeth is "unsexed;" Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman; both are conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable? In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers and the murder must be insulated-cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs-locked up and sequestered in some deep recess; we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested-laid asleep—

tranced-racked into a dread armistice: time must be annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is, that when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard, and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.

O mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art, but are also like the phenomena of nature-like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers, like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder,-which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert, but that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!

AN INTERVIEW WITH A MALAY.

One day a Malay knocked at my door. What business a Malay could have to transact among English mountains, I cannot conjecture; but possibly he was on on his road to a sea-port, about forty miles distant. The servant who opened the door to him was a young girl born and bred among the mountains, who had never seen an Asiatic dress of any sort: his turban, therefore, confounded her not a little; and, as it turned out that his attainments in English were exactly of the same extent as her's in the Malay, there seemed to be an impassable gulf fixed between all communication of ideas, if either party had happened to possess any. In this dilemma, the girl recollecting the reputed learning of her master, (and, doubtless, giving me credit for a knowledge of all the languages of the earth, besides, perhaps, a few of the lunar ones,) came and gave me to understand that there was a sort of demon below, whom she clearly imagined that my art could exorcise from the house. I did not immediately go down; but when I did, the group which presented itself, arranged as it was by accident, though not very elaborate, took hold of my fancy and my eye in a way that none of the statuesque attitudes exhibited in the ballets at the operahouse, though so ostentatiously complex, had ever done. In a cottage kitchen, but panelled on the wall with dark wood that from age and rubbing resembled oak, and looking more like a rustic hall of entrance than a kitchen, stood the Malay-his turban and loose