Then first Columbus, with the mighty hand
Of grasping genius, weigh'd the sea and land;
The floods o'erbalanced:—where the tide of light,
Day after day, roll'd down the gulf of Night,
There seem'd one waste of waters:—long in vain
His spirit brooded o'er the Atlantic main;
When sudden, as creation burst from nought,
Sprang a new world through his stupendous thought,
Light, order, beauty !—While his mind explored
The unveiling mystery, his heart adored;
Where'er sublime imagination trod,
He heard the voice, he saw the face of God!

Far from the western cliffs he cast his eye
O'er the wide ocean stretching to the sky;
In calm magnificence the sun declined,
And left a paradise of clouds behind:
Proud at his feet, with pomp of pearl and gold,
The billows in a sea of glory roll'd.

"Ah! on this sea of glory might I sail,
Track the bright sun, and pierce the eternal veil
That hides those lands, beneath Hesperian skies,
Where daylight sojourns till our morrow rise!"

Thoughtful he wande^d on the beach alone;
Mild o'er the deep the vesper planet shone,
The eye of evening, brightening through the west
Till the sweet moment when it shut to rest:
"Whither, O golden. Venus! art thou fled 1
Not in the ocean-chambers lies thjr bed;
Bound the dim world thy glittering chariot drawn
Pursues the twilight, or precedes the dawn;
Thy beauty noon and midnight never see,
The morn and eve divide the year with thee."

Soft fell the shades, till Cynthia's slender bow
Crested the farthest wave, then sank below:
"Tell me, resplendent guardian of the night,
Circling the sphere in thy perennial flight,
What secret path of heaven thy smiles adorn,
What nameless sea reflects thy gleaming horn /"

Montgomery's Poems.

In all the pride of freedom.—Nature Eree
Proclaims that Man was born for liberty.
She flourishes where'er the sunbeams play
O'er living fountains, sallying into day;
She withers where the waters cease to roll,
And night and winter stagnate round the pole:
Man, too, where Freedom's beams and fountains rise,
Springs from the dust, aud blossoms to the sides;
Dead to the joys of light and life, the slave
Clings to the clod; his root is in the grave;
Bondage is winter, darkness, death, despair,—
Freedom, the sun, the sea, the mountains, and the air

In placid indolence supinely blest,
A feeble race these beauteous isles possess'd;
Untamed, untaught, in arts and arms unskill'd,
Their patrimonial soil they rudely till'd,
Chased the free rovers of the savage wood,
Ensnared the wild-bird, swept the scaly flood,
Shelter'd in lowly huts their fragile forms
From burning suns and desolating storms;
Or, when the halcyon sported on the breeze,
In light canoes they skimm'd the rippling seas;
Their lives in dreams of soothing languor flew,
No parted joys, no future pains they knew,
The passing moment all their bliss or care;
Such as the sires had been, the children were
From age to age; as waves upon the tide
Of stormless time, they calmly lived and died.

Dreadful as hurricanes, athwart the main
Rush'd the fell legions of invading Spain;
With fraud aud force, with false and fatal breath,
(Submission bondage, and resistance death,)
They swept the isles. In vain the simple race
Kneel'd to the iron sceptre of their grace,
Or with weak arms their fiery vengeance braved;
They came, they saw, theyconquer'd, they enslaved,
And they destroy'd;—the geneious heart they broke,
They crush'd the timid neck beneath the yoke;