Such is, in this and numerous other instances,
the altered state of the continent and of Europe, since the annotation
of the "late traveller;" and on the authority of a _later_, we must
report that the ware has been all broken since the former passed that
way. We wish that we could efficiently exhort Mr. Wedgewood to send out
a fresh supply, on all the _turnpike roads_ by the route of Bagdad, for
the convenience of the "latest travellers."
Passing over the "Chorus from Euripides," which might as well have slept
in quiet with the rest of the author's school-exercises, we come to "the
Visionary," which we gladly extract as a very elegant specimen of the
lighter poems:
"When midnight o'er the moonless skies
Her pall of transient death has spread,
When mortals sleep, when spectres rise,
And nought is wakeful but the dead!
"No bloodless shape my way pursues,
No sheeted ghost my couch annoys.
Visions more sad my fancy views,
Visions of long departed joys!
"The shade of youthful hope is there,
That linger'd long, and latest died;
Ambition all dissolved to air,
With phantom honours at her side.
"What empty shadows glimmer nigh!
They once were friendship, truth, and love!
Oh, die to thought, to mem'ry die,
Since lifeless to my heart ye prove!"
We cannot forbear adding the beautiful stanzas in pages 166, 167:
"To THE LADY ANNE HAMILTON.
"Too late I staid, forgive the crime,
Unheeded flew the hours;
How noiseless falls the foot of Time,
That only treads on flow'rs!
"What eye with clear account remarks
The ebbing of his glass,
When all its sands are di'mond sparks,
That dazzle as they pass?
"Ah! who to sober measurement
Time's happy swiftness brings,
When birds of Paradise have lent
Their plumage for his wings?"
The far greater part of the volume, however, contains pieces which can
be little gratifying to the public:--some are pretty; and all are
besprinkled with "gems," and "roses," and "birds," and "diamonds," and
such like cheap poetical adornments, as are always to be obtained at no
great expense of thought or of metre.
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