Oft her modest face she shrouds
In a veil of silvery clouds,

Bursting forth with brighter beams,
As if washed in their white streams;
Rides majestic o'er the sky,
While the clouds around her fly:
This is thy nocturnal dress,
Solitude! sweet shepherdess.

Montgomery's earliest compositions had the stamp of seriousness impressed upon them; but on receiving in London a check to his ambition, they assumed a very different character. Despairing of success in the higher walks of poetry, he cultivated the humourous and burlesque, and took for his model Fontaine and Hall Stevenson, the prototypes of Peter Pindar. This was an erratic wandering, not likely to terminate to his advantage, and imprisonment and serious reflection induced his return to the path he had forsaken. His "Prison Amusements," though on the whole very inferior to this volume, contain many passages eminently beautiful, and some delightful little poems. The extracts which follow are from the "Brahmin,” a poem in two cantos, the only production he has yet given to the world in heroic measure. The first is a part of his description of the Brahmin, and will be read with pleasure; the second is a gem of the most exquisite finish.

"Like æther pure, expansive as the pole,
And bountiful as nature was his soul;
Benevolence, the friend of all distrest,
Had built her temple in his holy breast;

He healed the sick, the drooping spirit cheered,
Grief shunned his eye and anguish disappeared.
He spoke; despair like midnight fled away,
He smiled and comfort brightened like the day.

Majestic rising, like the vivid morn,
On wings of winds magnificently borne,
A strong, imperial eagle mounts on high,
Cleaves the light clouds and sails along the sky,
Broad to the sun his kindling breast he turns,
Till all his plumage in the radiance burns ;
While from his eye, reanimated light
Breaks like the day-spring on the brow of night.
Now from the throne of noon his sight he bends,
Where far beneath the dusky world extends,
His boundless vision beams from pole to pole,
Where empires flourish and where oceans roll;
The radiant palace of the morn he sees,

And the green vales that nurse the evening breeze;
The realms of ice where tempests dwell forlorn,
And southern seas, where vernal showers are born.
Sublimely thus, with transport unconfined,
On wings of immortality, the mind

Through nature's infinite dominions soars,
Admires her works, her mysteries explores.

From wisdom's sun imbibes inspiring light,
And glories in the grandeur of her flight;
While far removed the groveling world appears
A mount of follies and a vale of tears."

It is always gratifying to contemplate the triumph of genius over time, place, and circumstance; to behold her setting at nought the malace and the frowns of fortune; lifting her head above the storm that assails her; displaying her richest endowments and issuing her sublimest emanations from the walls of a prison.

The next extract, somewhat faulty from the recurrence of the same rhyme in two following stanzas, will close my selections from Montgomery's Prison Amusements. It is here introduced, because it unfolds not only the acuteness of his sufferings during the first hours of confinement, but the train of thinking, and the feeling which taught him resignation, even under the pressure of great bodily indisposition.

"Saw him in prison desponding and faint, She saw him in act to expire.

Then melting her voice to the tenderest tone,
The lovely enthusiast began

To sing in sweet numbers the comforts unknown
That solace the soul of the man,

Who hated, forsaken, tormented, opprest,
And wrestling with anguish severe,

Can turn his eye inward, and view in his breast
A conscience unclouded and clear.

The captive looked up with a languishing eye,
Half quenched in a tremulous tear;

He saw the meek angel of Hope standing by,
He heard her solicit his ear:

Her strain then exalting, and swelling her lyre,
The triumphs of patience she sung,
While passions of music and language of fire
Flowed full and sublime from her tongue."

From "A TALE TOO TRUE."

Montgomery's last production has passed the ordeal of criticism with success, and attained a place in the estimation of the public, to which it is entitled by its intrinsic excellence. The Wanderer of Switzerland has been received with kindness, and treated with hospitality his story has been heard with attention, and the tear has been shed upon his sorrows.

Fastidious must the taste of that man be who could peruse the preceding extracts, and withhold from their author the name and honours of a poet; his character, as a candidate for these honours, is all that remains to be added; though but a sketch, the linea ments given will be found to be correct.

20

SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR'S LIFE.

The various qualifications essential to poetry are to be found in the poems of Montgomery-richness of fancy, strength and splendour of imagination, bold and appropriate metaphor, great vigour of thought, grace and fervour of expression; they have a smooth, harmonious flow of versification, united with great tenderness and feeling: his cadences and his pauses are peculiarly his own; so likewise are the general tone and colouring that pervade them. His strains have but little similitude to those of any other poet, one alone excepted: sometimes he has borrowed the harp of Collins, whose spirit breathing upon its strings, makes melancholy music.