A PICTURE AT NEWSTEAD.

WHAT

HAT made my heart, at Newstead, fullest swell?

'T was not the thought of Byron, of his cry

Stormily sweet, his Titan agony ;

It was the sight of that Lord Arundel

Who struck, in heat, the child he loved so well,
And the child's reason flickered, and did die.
Painted (he willed it) in the gallery

They hang; the picture doth the story tell.

Behold the stern, mailed father, staff in hand!
The little fair-haired son, with vacant gaze,
Where no more lights of sense or knowledge are!

Methinks the woe which made that father stand
Baring his dumb remorse to future days,
Was woe than Byron's woe more tragic far.

I

RACHEL.

I.

N Paris all looked hot and like to fade.

Brown in the garden of the Tuileries,

Brown with September, drooped the chestnut-trees. 'T was dawn; a brougham rolled through the streets, and made

Halt at the white and silent colonnade

Of the French Theatre. Worn with disease,
Rachel, with eyes no gazing can appease,

Sat in the brougham, and those blank walls surveyed.

She follows the gay world, whose swarms have fled

To Switzerland, to Baden, to the Rhine.

Why stops she by this empty play-house drear?

Ah, where the spirit its highest life hath led,
All spots, matched with that spot, are less divine;
And Rachel's Switzerland, her Rhine, is here!

RACHEL.

II.

UNTO a lonely villa in a dell

Above the fragrant warm Provençal shore

The dying Rachel in a chair they bore

Up the steep pine-plumed paths of the Estrelle,

And laid her in a stately room, where fell
The shadow of a marble Muse of yore,

The rose-crowned queen of legendary lore,
Polymnia, full on her death-bed. 'T was well!

The fret and misery of our Northern towns,
In this her life's last day, our poor, our pain,
Our jangle of false wits, our climate's frowns,

Do for this radiant Greek-souled artist cease;
Sole object of her dying eyes remain
The beauty and the glorious art of Greece.

S

RACHEL.

III.

PRUNG from the blood of Israel's scattered race,

At a mean inn in German Aarau born,

To forms from antique Greece and Rome uptorn,
Tricked out with a Parisian speech and face,

Imparting life renewed, old classic grace;
Then soothing with thy Christian strain forlorn,
À-Kempis! her departing soul outworn,

While by her bedside Hebrew rites have place;

Ah! not the radiant spirit of Greece alone

She had,

one power, which made her breast its home!

In her, like us, there clashed contending powers,

Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome!
The strife, the mixture in her soul, are ours;
Her genius and her glory are her own.