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In everlasting retrospect

Will wring my sinful soul!

"Alas! I have walked through life
Too heedless where I trod;

Nay, helping to trample my fellow-worm,
And fill the burial sod-

Forgetting that even the sparrow falls
Not unmarked of God!

"I drank the richest draughts,
And ate whatever is good-
Fish, and flesh, and fowl, and fruit,
Supplied my hungry mood;

But I never remembered the wretched ones
That starve for want of food!

"I dressed as the nobles dress,

In cloth of silver and gold,

With silk, and satin, and costly furs,
In many an ample fold;

But I never remembered the naked limbs
That froze with winter's cold.

"The wounds I might have healed!
The human sorrow and smart!

And yet it never was in my soul
To play so ill a part:

But evil is wrought by want of thought
As well as want of heart!"

She clasped her fervent hands,

And the tears began to stream;
Large, and bitter, and fast they fell,
Remorse was so extreme;

And yet, oh yet, that many a dame
Would dream the Lady's Dream!

The following humorous "punning ballad" is so characteristic of Hood, that I must insert it. It is the story of

"FAITHLESS SALLY BROWN."

Young Ben he was a nice young man,
A carpenter by trade;

And he fell in love with Sally Brown,
Who was a lady's maid.

But, as they fetched a walk one day,

They met a press-gang crew;

And Sally she did faint away,
Whilst Ben he was brought to.

The boatswain swore, with wicked words,
Enough to shock a saint,

That, though she did seem in a fit,
'Twas nothing but a feint.

"Come, girl," said he, "hold up your head, He'll be as good as me;

For, when your swain is in our boat,
A boatswain he will be."

So, when they'd made their game of her,
And taken off her elf,

She roused, and found she only was
A-coming to herself.

"And is he gone, and is he gone?"
She cried, and wept outright;
"Then I will to the water-side,
And see him out of sight."

A waterman came up to her-
"Now, young woman," said he,
"If you weep on so, you will make
Eye-water in the sea."

"Alas! they've taken my beau Ben,
To sail with old Ben-bow ;"
And her woe begun to run afresh,
As if she had said "Gee woe!"

Says he, "They've only taken him
To the tender-ship you see;"
"The tender ship!" cried Sally Brown-
"What a hard-ship that must be !

"Oh! would I were a mermaid now,
For then I'd follow him;

But oh! I'm not a fish-woman,
And so I cannot swim.

"Alas! I was not born beneath

The Virgin and the Scales-
So I must curse my cruel stars,
And walk about in Wales."

Now Ben had sailed to many a place
That's underneath the world;
But in two years the ship came home,
And all her sails were furled.

But when he called on Sally Brown,
To see how she got on,

He found she'd got another Ben,

Whose Christian name was John.

"Oh Sally Brown, oh Sally Brown,
How could you serve me so!
I've met with many a breeze before,
But never such a blow!"

Then, reading on his 'bacco-box,
He heaved a heavy sigh,

And then began to eye his pipe,
And then to pipe his eye.

And then he tried to sing " All's Well,"
But could not, though he tried;

His head was turned, and so he chewed
His pigtail till he died.

His death, which happened in his berth,
At forty odd befell:

They went and told the sexton, and
The sexton tolled the bell!"

THE POOR LABORER.

Some time since a strong inward impulse moved me to paint the destitution of an overtasked class of females, who work, work, work, for wages almost nominal. But deplorable as is their condition in the low deep, there is, it seems, a lower still-below that gloomy gulf, a darker region of human misery-beneath that purgatory, a hell-resounding with more doleful wailings and a sharper outery-the voice of famishing wretches, pleading vainly for work! work! work!-imploring as a blessing what was laid upon man as a curse-the labor that wrings sweat from the brow, and bread from the soil!

As a matter of conscience, that wail touches me not. As my works testify, I am of the working class myself, and, in my humble sphere, furnish employment for many hands, including papermakers, draughtsmen, engravers, compositors, pressmen, binders, folders, and stitchers-and critics-all receiving a fair day's wages for a fair day's work. My gains consequently are limited -not nearly so enormous as have been realized upon shirts, slops, shawls, &c.-curiously illustrating how a man or woman might be "clothed with curses as with a garment." My fortune may be expressed without a long row of those ciphers-those O's at once significant of hundreds of thousands of pounds, and as many ejaculations of pain and sorrow from dependent slaves. My wealth might all be hoarded, if I were miserly, in a gallipot or a tin snuff-box. My riches would hardly allow me a roll in them, even if turned into the new copper mites. But then, thank God, no reproach clings to my coin. No tears or blood clog the meshes; no hair, plucked in desperation, is knitted with the silk of my lean purse. No consumptive sempstress can point at me her

bony forefinger, and say, "For thee, sewing in formâ pauperis, I am become this living skeleton!" or hold up to me her fatal needle, as one through the eye of which the scriptural camel must pass ere I may hope to enter heaven. No withered workwoman, shaking at me her dripping suicidal locks, can cry, in a piercing voice, "For thee, and for six poor pence, I embroidered eighty flowers on this veil"-literally a veil of tears. No famishing laborer, his joints racked with toil, holds out to me in the palm of his broad hard hand seven miserable shillings, and mutters, "For these, and a parish loaf, for six long days, from dawn till dusk, through hot and cold, through wet and dry, I tilled thy land!" My short sleeps are peaceful; my dreams untroubled. No ghastly phantoms with reproachful faces, and silence more terrible than speech, haunt my quiet pillow. No victims of slow murder, ushered by the avenging fiends, beset my couch, and make awful appointments with me to meet at the Divine bar on the day of judgment. No deformed human creatures-men, women, and children, smirched black as negroes, transfigured suddenly, as demons of the pit-clutch at my heels to drag me down, down, down, an unfathomable shaft, into a gaping Tartarus. And if, sometimes, in waking visions I see throngs of little faces, with features preternaturally sharp, and wrinkled brows, and dull, seared orbs-grouped with pitying clusters of the young-eyed cherubim not for me, thank Heaven! did those crippled children become prematurely old, and precociously evaporate, like so much steam power, the "dew of their youth."

To me-speaking from my heart, and recording my deliberate opinions on a material that, frail as it is, will long outlast my own fabric there is something deeply affecting in the spectacle of a young man, in the prime of health and vigor, offering himself a voluntary slave in the labor-market without a purchaser-eagerly proffering to barter the use of his body, the day-long exertion of his strength, the wear and tear of flesh and blood, bone and muscle, for the common necessaries of life-earnestly craving for bread on the penal conditions prescribed by his Creator, and in vain, in vain! Well for those who enjoy each blessing of earth that there are volunteers to work out the curse! Well for the drones of the social hive that there are bees of so industrious a turu, willing for an infinitesimal share of the honey to undertake the labor of its fabrication !

SYDNEY SMITH, 1769-1845.

THIS most accomplished scholar and very original writer was born at Woodford, near London, in the year 1769. He was educated at Winchester College, and thence elected to New College, Oxford, where he obtained a fellowship. He was ordained to a curacy in Wiltshire, and afterwards, in 1801, was among the foremost of the projectors of the "Edinburgh Review." But it is altogether better that he should speak for himself, and his subsequent movements are thus most agreeably noticed in the preface to the recent edition of his collected works:

FOUNDATION OF THE EDINBURGH REVIEW.

When first I went into the church, I had a curacy in the middle of Salisbury Plain. The squire of the parish took a fancy to me, and requested me to go with his son to reside at the University of Weimar: before we could get there, Germany became the seat of war, and in stress of politics we put into Edinburgh, where I remained five years. The principles of the French Revolution were then fully afloat, and it is impossible to conceive a more violent and agitated state of society. Among the first persons with whom I became acquainted were Lord Jeffrey, Lord Murray (late Lord Advocate for Scotland), and Lord Brougham; all of them maintaining opinions upon political subjects a little too liberal for the dynasty of Dundas, then exercising supreme power over the northern division of the island.

One day we happened to meet in the eighth or ninth story or flat in Buccleugh-place, the elevated residence of the then Mr. Jeffrey. I proposed that we should set up a review; this was acceded to with acclamation. I was appointed editor, and remained long enough in Edinburgh to edit the first number of the "Edinburgh Review." The motto I proposed for the Review was,

"Tenui musam meditamur avenâ."

"We cultivate literature upon a little oatmeal.”

But this was too near the truth to be admitted, and so we took our present grave motto from Publius Syrus, of whom none of us had, I am sure, ever read a single line; and so began what has since turned out to be a very important and able journal. When I left Edinburgh, it fell into the stronger hands of Lord Jeffrey and Lord Brougham, and reached the highest point of popularity

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