Thy Maker look'd upon his work and smiled-
Seeing that it was good!-And gave thee charge
Thenceforth for evermore with constant eye
To watch the times and seasons, and preserve
The circling maze, exact. Pure minister
Of his unerring, all-pervading mind-

Wherever is thy dwelling-place-All hail !—”

After descanting on the inscrutable nature of the divine Author of the Universe, the poet contrasts the magnitude and durability of his works with the narrowness and uncertainty of human designs:

"All that is human fleeteth-nought endures
Beneath the firmament."

This truth has been so often endited, both in prose and poetry, that it now begins to lose the gloss of novelty. Bowzebeus* himself could sing how "the corn now grows where Troy town stood," and we have been so often assured of Babylon, Memphis, and Tadmor being now little better than piles of rubbish, and of the generations that inhabited them having passed away like the beings of a dream, that it baffles all ordinary powers of verse to give an air of originality to the fact. We remember a Presbyterian preacher, who enlivened this solemn truism by a rhetorical hypothesis peculiar to the Calvinistic pulpit"Where," said he, "my friends," (astonishing the audience by an unexpected display of his erudition,)" where are all your "great men of antiquity-your Hectors, and your Homers, and "Alexanders, and where is Pontius Pilate, and Epicurus the "great stoic, and all your Greek and Roman heathens? They 66 are all dead, my friends, and what is worse, I am afraid they " are all damned."

Amidst a good deal of common-place matter, however, we were struck by the beauty and spirit of the following description of Pompeii :

"Thus deep, beneath

Earth's bosom, and the mansions of the graves
Of men, are graves of cities. Such of late,
From its long sleep of darkness disinterr'd,
Pompeii, with its low and buried roofs,

Rose dark upon the miner's progress, like
A city of the dead! a tomb perchance

Where living Men were buried!--Tyrant Death!
How didst thou triumph then! thou us❜d'st to steal
Behind thy sallow harbinger Disease,

Or take thine open and determinate stand
In battle's ranks; with Danger at thy side
Forewarning gallant breasts prepar'd to die;
But there thy spectral visage darken'd forth,
Amid the joyous bosom scenes of life,
From its invisible ambush! There-it found

* In Gay's Pastorals.

The myriad fantasies of hearts and brains,
Young loves and hopes and pleasures all abroad,
Spreading their painted wings, and wantoning
In life's glad summer breeze, from flower to flower!
And, with the fatal spell of one dread glance,
Blasted them all!-How sunk the tender maid
Then silent in the chill and stiffening clasp
Of her dead lover! Echo had not ceased
To catch love's inarticulate ecstasies,
Strain'd in a first embrace-for ever, then,
Fix'd statue-like in Death's tremendous arms;
A hideous contrast!-One fell moment still'd
Lovers and foes alike;-workers of good,
And guilty wretches;-then the statesman's brain
Stopp'd in its calculation, and the bard
Sunk by his lyre :-the loud procession
Before the temple-all the cares of life,

With action and contrivance, through the streets
Throng'd multitudinous, in their busy time
Of bustle and magnificence, and all

Life's thousands were abroad, and the high sounds
Of civic pomp rose audible from far:-

But louder rose the terrible voice of ruin

Over their mirth,-" BE STILL"-and all was hush'd!

Save the short shuddering cries that rose unheard-
The upturn'd glances from a thousand homes
Thro' the red closing surge! the awful groan

Of agitated Nature;-and beneath,

Ten thousand victims turn'd to die :-Above

Bright sunbeams lit the plain-a nameless tomb !"

In the second part the poet apostrophizes the morning star, and fondly dreaming that it is a world of unprofaned luxuriance, makes a natural transition to the possible amelioration and happiness of the beings who inhabit our own planet :

"Star of the brightening East!-Thyself most bright,-
That thro' the shadowy air of silent morn

Shedd'st thy lone love-beams down!-'Tis sweet to think
-And soothing to the sorrow-stricken mind-
They dawn upon us, from a blessed home
Of peace and love!—For gazing on thy light,
I feel their solace, and forget to mourn!
Tired of my woes, I mount upon the wing
Of spirit, to thy glorious eminence,
To seek forgetfulness of storms that rend
A turbulent and transitory world!"

"For in that blessed noon of time, the world
Shall be as one wide city-with its streets
And several factories, apart, yet join'd,
Commingling in one spacious mart,-by one
Collective spirit ruled, through all her realms;
One wisdom and one faith shall govern man:
And his regenerate race shall o'er all kinds
Regain its lost dominion!-Walls shall rise,
Where monsters range the aboriginal woods
And thickets, undisturb'd;-and tillage fields
Bloom, where the horrid wilderness o'ershades
Th' unseemly loves, and instincts murderous

Of snaky broods, or, oft, at night, more fell
The tiger walks, and by some lone, scared hut
Prowls like a demon, uttering crics of death.

All dark and horrid things shall cease, and then
Evanishing, like spirits from pure dawn,
Fly from the waking world, then new disclosed,
In morning's mildly bright magnificence,
O'er many a climate, gilding tower, and town,
And dwelling seen by wood and mountain far,
Girt by the peaceful populous main, no more
By Heaven's dread wrath to tempests wrought,
And then shall sounds of many voices wake
Those low and mouldering fanes, where Silence now
With Desolation holds coëval sway,
Amid the wrecks of dim antiquity!

or man's.

Then, from their tombs of time restored, shall they
Arising from the dust stand numerous

From Ganges westward to the Nile: Then, proud,
Old Nineveh shall arise, and THAT predoom'd
Till then to sleep in fate!-Nor far from these,
That famous in the songs of Araby
Sung to its wizard lyre,-metropolis
And palace of Almansor shall be seen,
And, pillared on its golden capitals,
Hold commerce with all earth!

For then shall be

A highway through all nations, and a bond
Of joyful union!-Ispahan shall send
Glad tiding unto Sibir and Cathay,

Re-echoed with glad notes; for in that time
Peace shall attune the trumpet, never more

To shake the warrior's breast with fierce delight,
But with its silver mounting lay sublime,
Winning the universal world to love!"

We take leave of Mr. Maturin, wishing to see his agreeable genius exercised on wieldier subjects than the Universe, and objecting to that theme, to borrow two of his own expressions, "most chiefly" on account of its "vastitude.”

PARRY'S EXPEDITION.*

In proportion to the disappointment which the public felt, with respect to the comparative failure of Captain Ross's expedition, in 1818, for the purpose of discovering a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, have been the fresh hopes excited by Captain Parry's appointment to a similar destination. It was reasonably enough to be expected that the lights, feeble as they were, which Captain Ross had thrown upon the track prescribed, as far as he had proceeded on it, would at least teach his followers what to avoid; and in the

* Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific; performed in the years 1819-20, in his Majesty's ships Hecla and Griper, under the orders of William Edward Parry, R. N. F. R. Ş.

same manner it was hoped, that all the errors of judgment manifested by one party, would tend to the sharpening of it in another.

The Admiralty sufficiently showed how well satisfied it was with the conduct of Lieutenant Parry, whilst he was with Captain Ross, by appointing him to the command of the Hecla, for the further prosecution of those important inquiries, in which for nearly three centuries all the maritime nations of Europe have been deeply interested. In consideration of the lively interest felt in all ranks of society who have been enabled to hear of this second expedition, for the success and welfare of the individuals who composed it, we hasten to lay before our readers a detail of their proceedings, as far as the general interests which they set out to promote may be considered to have been served. In this "brief chronicle and abstract," however, we must premise, that we give a biographical, if we may so term it, rather than a scientific sketch of their proceedings; want of room obliging us to forego any account of the experiments and observations made during the voyage, and which are in themselves important enough to form the subject of a separate and most interesting article.

THE Hecla, Captain Parry, accompanied by the gun-brig Griper, commanded by Lieutenant Matthew Liddon, under the orders of Captain Parry, began her voyage on the 4th of May, 1819. The Griper appears from the first to have been remarked as a bad sailer, which was afterwards the source of much inconvenience to Captain Parry. It is needless to say, that these ships were fitted out with every aid which human ingenuity could suggest, both for comfort and science; and, as the crews consisted chiefly of those whose good conduct on the former expedition had gained them the confidence of their superiors, the voyage commenced under the most favourable auspices.

On entering Davis's Strait, the adventurers began to encounter the usual difficulties and danger attendant on navigating the Arctic Seas; and being baffled in their attempt to penetrate the ice to the Western Coast, they proceeded up the Strait, and entering Baffin's Bay, made a resolute and successful effort to penetrate an immense barrier of ice, which occupied the middle of it, running eighty miles in a N. 63° W. direction; and arrived on the southern side of the entrance into Sir James Lancaster's Sound on the 30th of July. Here, Captain Parry remarks, they seemed to have got into the head-quarters of the whales, eighty-two being seen on that day: hence he concludes the Greenland fishermen's idea, that the presence of ice is necessary for the finding of whales, to be erroneous -there not being any ice in sight at the time when the whales were most numerous. Captain Parry reached the entrance of this Sound exactly a month earlier than Captain Ross had done in 1818, which he attributes to his feeling assured, from the experience he had

gained in his former voyage, that he should find an open sea to the westward of the barrier of ice in the middle of Baffin's Bay: which confidence gave him the resolution to persist in forcing his passage through it, though it had never before been crossed in this latitude at the same season: such is the value of experience. Many of the party landed at Possession Bay, and recognised the objects they had remarked there on the former expedition; and Mr. Fisher, the assistant-surgeon, found the tracks of human feet upon the banks of a stream, which seem, at first, to have struck him with as much surprise as Robinson Crusoe felt at seeing the print of the savage's foot in the sand; but, on a more accurate examination, they were discovered to have been made by the shoes of some of the same party eleven months before.

It was not without considerable emotion that Captain Parry entered the great Sound, or inlet of Baffin's Bay, to which his attention was particularly to be directed, by the orders of the Admiralty, and on the exploration of which the success or failure of the whole expedition might be expected to turn. The contrariety of the wind, and the unequal sailing of the Griper, kept the whole party in a painful state of impatience, which they beguiled as well as they could, by continual soundings and lookings out, and counting the whales, which appeared in considerable numbers, several of them younger than had been seen before in Baffin's Bay; it being generally remarked, that they are not found there as in the seas of Spitzbergen. At length an easterly breeze springing up, on the sd of August, the Hecla crowded all sail, and was carried rapidly on towards the westward.

"It is more easy to imagine than to describe," says Captain Parry, in his narrative," the almost breathless anxiety which was now visible in every countenance, while, as the breeze increased to a fresh gale, we ran quickly up the Sound. The mast-heads were crowded by the officers and men during the whole afternoon; and an unconcerned observer, if any could have been unconcerned on such an occasion, would have been amused by the eagerness with which the various reports from the crow's nest were received; all, however, hitherto favourable to our most sanguine hopes."

To the northward and westward of Cape Warrender, the land on the opposite shore had opened out into bold headlands, high moun-tains, and in some parts table-land. The different bays and promontories, one after another, received names from Captain Parry, as the several dictates of respect for public officers, and regard for private individuals. One, which in hastily sailing past it he thus distinguished by the appellation of CROKER'S BAY, he is of opinion may, not improbably, prove one day to be a passage from Sir James Lancaster's Sound into the Northern Sea; as the speed with which he passed it did not allow him to determine the absolute continuity of land round the bottom of it. After being carried briskly on towards the westward for the space of two days, they began to flatter themselves, from the appearance of a cape, which Captain Sabine named CAPE FELLFOOT, and which seemed to form the termination VOL. I. No. 6.-1821.

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