own Thalaba, ever faithful, hopeful alike in seasons of victory and of doubt, and to hear him at last raising the exultant strain of triumph, as over the disastrous retreat from Moscow :—

"Witness that dread retreat,

When God and nature smote
The tyrant in his pride!

Victorious armies followed on his flight;

On every side he met

The Cossack's dreadful spear;

On every side he saw

The injured nation rise

Invincible in arms.

What myriads, victims of one wicked will,
Spent their last breath in curses on his head!

There where the soldiers' blood

Froze in the festering wound,

And nightly the cold moon

Saw sinking thousands in the snow lie down
Whom there the morning found
Stiff as their icy bed!"

The highest and most impetuous of these strains is the ode written during the negotiations with Napoleon in 1814. Since Milton's tremendous imprecation against the Papal tyranny on occasion of the Piedmontese massacre, I know of no piece of political invective equal to it. It is hurled with the force and the fire of a thunderbolt, one burst of indignation following another, and closing with an accumulation of all the deeds of blood identified with the name of him who had been at once the terror and the wonder of Europe. Let me give the opening and ending stanzas of the ode :

"Who counsels peace at this momentous hour, When God hath given deliverance to the oppressed, And to the injured power?

Who counsels peace when vengeance, like a flood, Rolls on, no longer now to be repressed;

When innocent blood,

From the four quarters of the world, cries out
For justice upon one accursed head;

When Freedom hath her holy banners spread
Over all nations, now in one just cause
United ;-when, with one sublime accord,
Europe throws off the yoke abhorred,
And loyalty and faith and ancient laws
Follow the avenging sword?

"Woe, woe to England! woe and endless shame,
If this heroic land,

False to her feelings and unspotted fame,
Hold out the olive to the tyrant's hand!
Woe to the world if Buonaparte's throne
Be suffered still to stand!

"France! if thou lovest thine ancient fame,
Revenge thy sufferings and thy shame.
By the bones which bleach on Jaffa's beach;
By the blood which on Domingo's shore
Hath clogged the carrion-birds with gore;
By the flesh which gorged the wolves of Spain,
Or stiffened on the snowy plain

Of frozen Moscovy;

By the bodies which lie all open to the sky, Tracking from Elbe to Rhine the tyrant's flight; By the widows' and the orphans' cry;

By the childless parents' misery;

By the lives which he hath shed;

By the ruin he hath spread;

By the prayers which rise for curses on his head,—

Redeem, O France! thine ancient fame!

Revenge thy sufferings and thy shame!

"Open thine eyes! Too long hast thou been blind!
Take vengeance for thyself and for mankind!
By those horrors which the night
Witnessed when the torch's light
To the assembled murderers showed
Where the blood of Condé flowed;
By thy murdered Pichegru's fame;
By murdered Wright,-an English name;
By murdered Palm's atrocious doom;
By murdered Hofer's martyrdom;

Oh! by the virtuous blood thus vilely spilt,

The Villain's own peculiar, private guilt,

Open thine eyes! Too long hast thou been blind!
Take vengeance for thyself and for mankind."

From these notes, tuned in tumultuous times, and fit to cope with the tempest's swell, let me further illustrate the varied power of Southey's genius by turning to a passage in his pleasing poem, "The Tale of Paraguay." It is an exquisite specimen of purely pathetic poetry,full of the truth of feeling and of fancy,—the description of the death-bed of a young and innocent female. What can be more beautiful or more touching than the line which actually pictures to your imagination the sweet smile of the dying one?—

"Who could dwell

Unmoved upon the fate of one so young,

So blithesome late? What marvel if tears fell

From that good man, as over her he hung,

And that the prayers he said came faltering from his tongue ?

"She saw him weep, and she could understand

The cause thus tremulously that made him speak.

By his emotion moved, she took his hand;

A gleam of pleasure o'er her pallid cheek

Past, while she looked at him with meaning meek,
And for a little while, as loth to part,

Detaining him, her fingers lank and weak

Played with their hold; then, letting him depart,

She

gave him a slow smile, that touched him to the heart.

"Mourn not for her; for what hath life to give
That should detain her ready spirit here?
Thinkest thou that it were worth a wish to live,
Could wishes hold her from her proper sphere
That simple heart, that innocence sincere
The world would stain. Fitter she ne'er could be
For the great change; and, now that change is near,
Oh, who would keep her soul from being free?
Maiden beloved of Heaven, to die is best for thee!

"She hath passed away, and on her lips a smile
Hath settled, fixed in death. Judged they aright,
Or suffered they their fancy to beguile
The reason, who believed that she had sight
Of heaven before her spirit took its flight?-
That angels waited round her lowly bed,
And that, in that last effort of delight,

When, lifting up her dying arms, she said,

'I come,' a ray from heaven upon her face was shed?”

I might exhibit yet another phase of Southey's poetry in his humorous pieces. No man has better shown that one trait of genius,-the carrying forward the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood:

"My days have been the days of joy,

And all my paths are paths of pleasantness;
And still my heart, as when I was a boy,

Doth never know an ebb of cheerfulness.

Time, which matures the intellectual part,

Hath tinged my hairs with grey, but left untouched my heart."

This natural and cultivated cheerfulness has vented itself in his playful poetry, to relieve his own exuberant feelings, and to gladden his happy household group. There is something exceedingly fine in hearing him at one time uttering strains that sound from Arabia, or Gothic Spain, or the wilds of America, or from the magic supernatural caverns under the night of the ocean, -at another time sounding one of those tremendous imprecations on the head of Bonaparte,-and then to find him writing, from the fulness of a father's heart, poetic stories for his children. This he deemed part of his vocation; for, as he sings in one of his sportive lyrics:

"I am laureate
To them and the king."

No man ever clung with deeper or manlier devotion to his household gods. For his children's sake, and for the sake of his own moral nature, he ever kept the young heart alive within him. There was wisdom in this, as he has shown in the plea that he has appended to one of his wild ballads :

"I told my tale of the Holy Thumb,

That split the dragon asunder;

And my daughters made great eyes as they heard,
Which were full of delight and wonder.

"With listening lips and looks intent,

There sate an eager boy,

Who shouted sometimes and clapt his hands,

And could not sit still for joy.