Terror and madness drive him back to men; Time passes on, and he grows bold; But still at heart there lies a secret fear; For now the year's dread round is drawing near. He laughs, but he is sick at heart; That will be told: it needs no words from thee, Bond-slave of sin! again the light! And nights must shine and darken o'er thy head, Again the ship lights all the land; Gone ship and Horse; but Lee's last hope is o'er; His spirit heard that Spirit say, Ay, cling to earth as sailor to the rock! He goes! So thou must loose thy hold, Nor sit thee in the calm Of gentle thoughts, where good men wait their close. Who's sitting on that long, black ledge, So weak and pale? A year and little more, And on the shingle now he sits, And rolls the pebbles 'neath his hands; Then tries each cliff, and cove, and jut, that bounds They ask him why he wanders so, From day to day, the uneven strand? "I wish, I wish that I might go! But I would go by land; And there's no way that I can find; I've tried All day and night!"-He seaward looked, and sighed. It brought the tear to many an eye, That, once, his eye had made to quail. Lee, go with us; our sloop is nigh; He shook." You know the Spirit-Horse I ride! He views the ships that come and go, Making it light around them, as they keep Their course right onward through the unsounded deep. And where the far-off sand-bars lift Into the air; then rush to mimic strife: That asking eye. O, how his worn thoughts crave- The rocks are dripping in the mist Scarce seen the running breakers;-list Lee hearkens to their voice." I hear, I hear You call. Not yet!-I know my time is near!" And now the mist seems taking shape, Lee kneels, but cannot pray.-Why mock him so! A sweet, low voice, in starry nights, And he must listen till the stars grow dim, Should bind the soul with bands of fear; But sin hath broke the world's sweet peace,-un strung The harmonious chords to which the angels sung. In thick dark nights he'd take his seat With savage roar, then pause and gather strength, But he no more shall haunt the beach, Nor feebly sit him down, Watching the swaying weeds:-another day, To-night the charmed number's told. So hears his soul, and fears the gathering night; Again he sits in that still room; Weakened with fear, lone, haunted by remorse, Poor, shattered wretch, there waits he that pale Horse. Not long he waits. Where now are gone Of airy glory?-Sudden darkness fell; All but the ocean's dull, low moan. Tis close at hand; for there, once more, And there he stands! His pale sides flame. He treads the waters as a solid floor; They're met." I know thou com'st for me," "I know that I must go with thee: It was not I alone that did the deed!"- Lee cannot turn. There is a force 'O, spare me," cries the wretch," thou fearful One!" "The time is come,-I must not go alone." "I'm weak and faint. O, let me stay!" Hard breathes the Spectre through the silent night; He's on the beach; but stops not there; Holds him by fearful spell; he cannot leap: It lights the sea around their track,— They're seen no more; the night has shut them in. The earth has washed away its stain; The sealed-up sky is breaking forth, Mustering its glorious hosts again, From the far south and north; The climbing moon plays on the rippling sea. -O, whither on its waters rideth Lee? EDMUND KEAN'S LEAR-FROM THE PAPER ON KEAN'S ACTING. It has been so common a saying, that Lear is the most difficult of characters to personate that we had taken it for granted no man could play it so as to satisfy us. Perhaps it is the hardest to represent. Yet the part which has generally been supposed the most difficult, the insanity of Lear, is scarcely more so than that of the choleric old king. Inefficient rage is almost always ridiculous; and an old man, with a broken-down boly and a mind falling in pieces from the violence of its uncontrolled passions, is in constant danger of exciting, along with our pity, a feeling of contempt. It is a chance matter to which we may be most movel. And this it is which makes the opening of Lear so difficult. We may as well notice here the objection which some make to the abrupt violence with which Kean VOL. II.-7 begins in Lear. If this be a fault, it is Shakespeare, and not Kean, who is to blame; for, no doubt, he has conceived it according to his author. Perhaps, however, the mistake lies in this case, where it does in most others, with whose who put themselves into the seat of judgment to pass upon great men. In most instances, Shakespeare has given us the gradual growth of a passion, with such little accompaniments as agree with it, and go to make up the whole man. In Lear, his object being to represent the beginning and course of insanity, he has properly enough gone but a little back of it, and introduced to us an old man of good feelings enough, but one who had lived without any true principle of conduct, and whose unruled passions had grown strong with age, and were ready, upon a disappointment, to make shipwreck of an intellect never strong. To bring this about, he begins with an abruptness rather unusual; and the old king rushes in before us, with his passions at their height, and tearing him like fiends. Kean gives this as soon as the fitting occasion offers itself. Had he put more of melancholy and depres sion, and less of rage into the character, we should have been much puzzled at his so suddenly going mad. It would have required the change to have been slower; and besides, his insanity must have been of another kind. It must have been monotonous and complaining, instead of continually varying; at one time full of grief, at another playful, and then wild as the winds that roared about him, and fiery and sharp as the lightning that shot by him. The truth with which he conceived this was not finer than his execution of it. Not for a moment, in his utmost violence, did he suffer the imbecility of the old man's anger to touch upon the ludicrous, when nothing but the justest conception and feeling of the character could have saved him from it. It has been said that Lear is a study for one who would make himself acquainted with the workings of an insane mind. And it is hardly less true, that the acting of Kean was an embodying of these workings. His eye, when his senses are first forsaking him, giving an inquiring look at what he saw, as if all before him was undergoing a strange and bewildering change which confused his brain,-the wandering, lost motions of his hands, which seemed feeling for something familiar to them, on which they might take hold and be assured of a safe reality,-the under monotone of his voice, as if he was questioning his own being, and what surrounded him,-the continuous, but slight, oscillating motion of the body, -all these expressed, with fearful truth, the bewildered state of a mind fast unsettling, and making vain and weak efforts to find its way back to its wonted reason. There was a childish, feeble gladness in the eye, and a half piteous smile about the mouth, at times, which one could scarce look upon without tears. As the derangement increased upon him, his eye lost its notice of objects about him, wandering over things as if he saw them not, and fastening upon the creatures of his crazed brain. The helpless and delighted fondness with which he clings to Edgar as an insane brother, is another instance of the justness of Kean's conceptions. Nor does he lose the air of insanity, even in the fine moralizing parts, and where he inveighs against the corrup tions of the world: There is a madness even in his reason. The violent and immediate changes of the passions in Lear, so difficult to manage without jarring upon us, are given by Kean with a spirit and with a fitness to nature which we had hardly thought possible. These are equally well done both before and after the loss of reason. The most difficult seene, in this respect, is the last interview between Lear and his daughters, Goneril and Regan,-(and how wonderfully does Kean carry it through!)—the scene which ends with the horrid shout and cry with which he runs out mad from their presence, as if his very brain had taken fire. We are The last scene which we are allowed to have of Shakespeare's Lear, for the simply pathetic, was played by Kean with unmatched power. We sink down helpless under the oppressive grief. It lies like a dead weight upon our hearts. denied even the relief of tears; and are thankful for the shudder that seizes us when he kneels to his daughter in the deploring weakness of his crazed grief. It is lamentable that Kean should not be allowed to show his unequalled powers in the last scene of Lear, as Shakespeare wrote it; and that this mighty work of genius should be profaned by the miserable, mawkish sort of by-play of Edgar's and Cordelia's loves: Nothing can surpass the impertinence of the man who made the change, but the folly of those who sanctioned it. INFLUENCE OF HOME-FROM THE PAPER ON DOMESTIÓ LIFE. Home gives a certain serenity to the mind, so that everything is well defined, and in a clear atmosphere, and the lesser beauties brought out to rejoice in the pure glow which floats over and beneath them from the earth and sky. In this state of mind afflictions come to us chastened; and if the wrongs of the world cross us in our door-path, we put them aside without anger. Vices are about us, not to lure us away, or make us morose, but to remind us of our frailty and keep down our pride. We are put into a right relation with the world; neither holding it in proud scorn, like the solitary man, nor being carried along by shifting and hurried feelings, and vague and careless notions of things, like the world's man. We do not take novelty for improvement, or set up vogue for a rule of conduct; neither do we despair, as if all great virtues had departed with the years gone by, though we see new vices, frailties, and follies taking growth in the very light which is spreading over the earth. Our safest way of coming into communion with mankind is through our own household. For there our sorrow and regret at the failings of the bad are in proportion to our love, while our familiar intercourse with the good has a secretly assimilating influence upon our characters. The domestic man has an independence of thought which puts him at ease in society, and a cheerfulness and benevolence of feeling which seem to ray out from him, and to diffuse a pleasurable sense over those near him, like a soft, bright day. As domestic life strengthens a man's virtue, so does it help to a sound judgment and a right balancing of things, and gives an inte grity and propriety to the whole character. God, in his goodness, has ordained that virtue should make its own enjoyment, and that wherever a vice or frailty is rooted out, something should spring up to be a beauty and delight in its stead. But a man of a character rightly cast, has pleasures at home, which, though fitted to his highest nature, are common to him as his daily food; and he moves about his house under a continued sense of them, and is happy almost without heeding it. Women have been called angels, in love-tales and sonnets, till we have almost learned to think of angels as little better than woman. Yet a man who knows a woman thoroughly, and loves her truly,and there are women who may be so known and loved,-will find, after a few years, that his relish for the grosser pleasures is lessened, and that he has grown into a fondness for the intellectual and refined without an effort, and almost unawares. He has been led on to virtue through his pleasures; and the delights of the eye, and the gentle play of that passion which is the most inward and romantic in our nature, and which keeps much of its character amidst the concerns of life, have held him in kind of spiritualized existence: he shares his very being with one who, a creature of this world, and with something of the world's frailties, is yet a Spirit still, and bright With something of an angel light. With all the sincerity of a companionship of feeling, cares, sorrows, and enjoyments, her presence is as the presence of a purer being, and there is that in her nature which seems to bring him nearer to a better world. She is, as it were, linked to angels, and in his exalted moments, he feels himself held by the same tie. We In the ordinary affairs of life, a woman has a greater influence over those near her than a man. While our feelings are, for the most part, as retired as anchorites, hers are in play before us. hear them in her varying voice; we see them in the beautiful and harmonious undulations of her movements, in the quick shifting hues of her face, in her eye, glad and bright, then fond and suffused; her frame is alive and active with what is at her heart, and all the outward form speaks. She seems of a finer mould than we, and cast in a form of beauty, which, like all beauty, acts with a moral influence upon our hearts; and as she moves about us, we feel a movement within which rises and spreads gently over us, harmonizing us with her own. And can any man listen to this,-Can his eye, day after day, rest upon this, and he not be touched by it, and made better? The dignity of a woman has its peculiar character; it awes more than that of man. His is more physical, bearing itself up with an energy of courage which we may brave, or a strength which we may struggle against; he is his own avenger, and we may stand the brunt. A woman's has nothing of this force in it; it is of a higher quality, and too delicate for mortal touch. RICHARD DABNEY. RICHARD DABNEY was born about 1787, in the county of Louisa, Virginia, of a family settled for several generations in that state, and which had, in early times of England, been Daubeney. Earlier still it is said to have been D'Aubigny or D'Aubigné, of France. His mother had been a Meriwether, aunt to Meriwether Lewis, who, with Captain Clarke, in Jefferson's presidency, explored the sources of the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains. Richard's father, Samuel Dabney, was a wealthy farmer and planter, with twelve children. None of them were regularly or thoroughly educated. Richard's instruction was but in the plainest rudiments of knowledge, till his sixteenth or eighteenth year, when he went to a school of Latin and Greek. In these languages he strode forward with great rapidity; learning in one or two years more than most boys learned in six. Afterwards he was an assistant teacher in a Richmond school. From the burning theatre of that city, in December, 1811, he barely escaped with life, receiving hurts which he bore with him to his grave. In 1812, however, he published in Richmond a thin duodecimo volume of Poems, Original and Translated, which, though of some merit, mortifyingly failed with the public, and he then endeavored to suppress the edition. Going to Philadelphia with general undefined views to literary pursuits, he published, through Mathew Carey, a much improved edition of his poems in 1815. This too was, as the publisher said, “quite a losing concern." Yet it had pieces remarkable for striking and vigorous thought; and the diversity of translation (from Grecian, Latin, and Italian poets) evinced ripeness of scholarship and correctness of taste. In the mechanical parts of poetry-in rhythm and in rhymes-he was least exact. Nearly half the volume consisted of translations. A short one from Sappho is not inelegant, or defective in versification: I cannot 'tis in vain to try- Dabney was said to have written a large portion of Carey's "Olive Branch, or Faults on Both Sides," designed to show how flagrantly both of the great parties (Federal and Republican) had sinned against their country's good, and against their own respective principles, whenever party interests or party rage commanded. In a few years more he returned to his native place, where his now widowed mother, with some of her children, lived upon her farm. Here he spent the rest of his life; in devouring such books and periodicals as he could find-in visits among a few of the neighboring farmers-and in such social enjoyments as rural Virginia then afforded, in which juleps and grog-drinking made a fearfully large part. Dabney had become an opium-eater, led on, it seems, by prescriptions of that poison for some of his injuries in the burning theatre. To this he added strong drink; and in his last years he was seldom sober when the means of intoxication were at hand. Some friends who desired to see his fine classical attainments turned to useful account, prevailed upon him to take a school of five or six boys, and that pursuit he continued nearly to the last. Dnring his country life, in 1818, was published a poem of much classic beauty, called "Rhododaphne, or the Thessalian Spell," which was attributed to Dabney by a Richmond Magazine, but he always denied the authorship; and Carey the publisher, in a letter dated 1827, says, "It was an English production, as my son informs me." Dabney died in November, 1825, at the age of thirty-eight; prominent among the myriads to whom the drinking usages of America have made appropriate the deep self-reproach We might have won the meed of fame, The prevailing traits of his mind were memory and imagination. His excellence was only in li terature. For mathematics and the sciences he had no strong taste. He was guileless, and had warm affections, which he too guardedly abstained from displaying, as he carried his dislike of courtliness and professions to the opposite extreme of cynicism.* YOUTH AND AGE. 1. As numerous as the stars of heaven, Are the fond hopes to mortals given; But two illume, with brighter ray, The morn and eve of life's short day. 2. Its glowing tints, on youth's fresh days, And bids its opening joys declare That all its minutes, all its hours Shall breathe of pleasure's sweetest flowers. But false the augury of that star The Lord of passion drives his car, Swift up the middle line of heaven, And blasts each flower that hope had given. 3. Its gentle beams, on man's last days, It points with slow, receding light, THE TRIBUTE. When the dark shades of death dim the warrior's eyes, When the warrior's spirit from its martial form flies, The proud rites of pomp are performed at his grave, And the pageants of splendor o'er its cold inmate wave; Though that warrior's deeds were for tyrants performed, And no thoughts of virtue that warrior's breast warmed, Though the roll of his fame is the record of death, And the tears of the widow are wet on his wreath. What then are the rites that are due to be paid, To the virtuous man's tomb, and the brave warrior's shade! To him, who was firm to his country's love? To him whom no might from stern virtue could move? Be his requiem, the sigh of the wretched bereft; We are indebted for this sketch of Richard Dabney to a gentleman of Virginia, Lucian Minor, Esq., of Louisa County. + Col. E. Carrington, a revolutionary patriot, who died in the autumn of 1810, in Richmond, Virginia. AN EPIGRAM, IMITATED FROM ARCHIAS. O wise was the people that deeply lamented And wise was the people that deeply delighted, When death snatched its victim from life's cheerless day; For then, all the clouds, life's views that benighted, They believed, at his touch, vanished quickly away. Life, faithless and treach'rous, is for ever presenting, To our view, flying phantoms we never can gain; Life, cruel and tasteless, is for ever preventing All our joys, and involving our pleasure in vain. Death, kind and consoling, comes calmly and lightly, The balm of all sorrow, the cure of all ill, And after a pang, that but thrills o'er us slightly, All then becomes tranquil, all then becomes still. NATHANIEL H. CARTER. NATHANIEL H. CARTER was born at Concord, New Hampshire, September 17, 1787. He was educated at Exeter academy and Dartmouth College, and on the completion of his course became a teacher at Salisbury, New Hampshire, whence he soon after removed to take a similar charge at Portland, Maine. In 1817 he was appointed professor of languages in the University created by the state legislature at Dartmouth, where he remained until the institution was broken up by a decision of the Supreme Court, when he removed to New York. In 1819 he became editor of the Statesman, a newspaper of the Clintonian party. In 1824 he delivered a poem at Dartmouth College before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, entitled The Pains of the Imagination. In the following year he visited Europe, and wrote home letters descriptive of his travels to the Statesinan, which were republished in other journals throughout the country. On his return in the spring of 1827 he published these letters, revised and enlarged, in two octavo volumes,* which were favorably received. In consequence of ill health he passed the following winter in Cuba, and on his return in the spring abandoned, for the same reason, the editorial profession. In the fall of 1829 he was invited by a friend residing in Marseilles to accompany him on a voyage to that place. While on shipboard, believing that his last hour was approaching, he wrote some lines entitled The Closing Scene, or the Burial at Sea. He survived, however, until a few days after his arrival, in December, 1829. Mr. Carter's letters furnish a pleasing and somewhat minute account of the objects of interest in an ordinary European tour, at the period of its publication much more of a novelty than at pre sent. His poems were written from time to time Letters from Europe, comprising the Journal of a Tour through England, Scotland, France, Italy, and Switzerland, in the years 1825, 26, and 27. By N. H. Carter. New York: 1827. 2 vols. 8vo. on incidents connected with his feelings, studies, and travels, and are for the most part simply reflective. ISAAC HARBY. ISAAC, the son of Solomon Harby, was the grandson of a lapidary of the Emperor of Morocco, who fled to England, and married an Italian lady. His son Solomon settled in Charleston, S. C., where Isaac was born in 1788. He was educated under the care of Dr. Best, a celebrated teacher of those days. He commenced, but soon abandoned the study of the law, and the support of his mother and the rest of his family falling upon him in consequence of the death of his father, he opened a school on Edisto Island, which met with success. His taste for literature and facility in writing soon brought him in connexion with the press. He became the editor of a weekly journal, the Quiver," and after its discontinuance of the "Investigator" newspaper, the title of which he changed to the "Southern Patriot," in which he supported the administration of Madison. He became widely and favorably known as a newspaper writer, especially in the department of theatrical criticism. In 1807, his play of the Gordian Knot, or Causes and Effects, was produced at the Charleston Theatre, where he had previously offered another five act piece, Alexander Severus, which was declined. It was played but a few times. In 1819, Alberti, a five act play by the same author, appeared with better success. It was published soon after its performance. In 1825 he delivered an address in Charleston, before the "Reformed Society of Israelites," advocating the addition of a sermon and services in English to the Hebrew worship of the Synagogue. In June, 1828, Harby removed from Charleston to New York, his object being to secure a larger audience for his literary labors. He contributed to the Evening Post and other city periodicals, and was fast acquiring an influential position, when his career was interrupted by his death, on the fourteenth of November, 1828. A selection from his writings was published at Charleston in the following year, in one volume octavo.* It contains his play of Alberti, Discourse before the Reformed Society of Israelites, and a number of political essays, with literary and theatrical criticisms, selected from his newspaper writings. Alberti is founded upon the history of Lorenzo de Medici, and designed to vindicate his conduct from "the calumnies of Alfieri in his tragedy called The Conspiracy of the Pazzi." The drama is animated in action, and smooth in versification. WILLIAM ELLIOTT. WILLIAM ELLIOTT, the grandfather of the subject of our remarks, removed from Charleston nearly a century ago, sold his possessions in St. Paul's, and settled at Beaufort, where he intermarried with Mary Barnwell, grand-daughter of John Barnwell, A Selection from the Miscellareons Writings of the late Isaac Harby, Esq., arranged and published by Henry L. PinckLey and Abraham Moise, for the benefit of his family. To which is prefixed a memoir of his life, by Abrahain Moise. |
