Whose louder

song is like the voice of life,

Triumphant o'er death's image; but whose deep,

Low, lovelier note is like a gentle wife,

A poor, a pensive, yet a happy one,

Stealing, when day-light's common tasks are done,
An hour for mother's work; and singing low,
While her tired husband and her children sleep.*

* This passage respecting the nightingale is not altogether "in keeping," (to use a painter's phrase), nor, indeed, are some others of this fragment; but the author retained them partly to introduce the passage itself; and in behalf of the latter he bespeaks the reader's indulgence, for a reason which the sensibility of true taste will allow him; namely, that the image is a copy from life, and from his mother.

THE EPHYDRIADS,

OR,

NYMPHS OF THE FOUNTAINS.-A SKETCH.

'Tis there the Ephydriads haunt ;-there, where a gap

Betwixt a heap of tree-tops, hollow and dun,

Shews where the waters run,

And whence the fountain's tongue begins to lap.

There lie they, lulled by little whiffling tones

Of rills among the stones,

Or by the rounder murmur, fast and flush,

Of the escaping gush,

That laughs and tumbles, like a conscious thing,

For joy of all its future travelling.

The lizard circuits them; and his grave will

The frog, with reckoning leap, enjoys apart,

Till now and then the woodcock frights his heart

With brushing down to dip his dainty bill.
Close by, from bank to bank,

A little bridge there is, a one-railed plank ;
And all is woody, mossy, and watery.

Sometimes a poet from that bridge might see

A Nymph reach downwards, holding by a bough With tresses o'er her brow,

And with her white back stoop

The pushing stream to scoop

In a green gourd cup, shining sunnily.

THE CLOUD.

A FRAGMENT.

As I stood thus, a neighbouring wood of elms
Was moved, and stirred and whispered loftily,
Much like a pomp of warriors with plumed helms,
When some great general whom they long to see
Is heard behind them, coming in swift dignity;
And then there fled by me a rush of air
That stirred up all the other foliage there,
Filling the solitude with panting tongues;
At which the pines woke up into their songs,
Shaking their choral locks; and on the place
There fell a shade as on an awe-struck face;

And overhead, like a portentous rim

Pulled over the wide world, to make all dim,
A grave gigantic cloud came hugely uplifting him.

It passed with it's slow shadow; and I saw
Where it went down beyond me on a plain,
Sloping it's dusky ladders of thick rain;
And on the mist it made, and blinding awe,
The sun, re-issuing in the opposite sky,

Struck the all-coloured arch of his great eye,
And the disburthened country laughed again :
The leaves were amber; the sunshine

Scored on the ground it's conquering line;

And the quick birds, for scorn of the great cloud,

Like children after fear, were merry and loud.