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STANZAS.

"Tis for thee, my love, I raise the cup, for a parting health to thee,
And my sweet babe, thy image fair, who are so dear to me;
To this loved home, wherein my heart in fancy oft will dwell,
Ye cherished three, to all and each, a tender fare-ye-well!

And yet, my Mary, first to thee my fondest thoughts are given,
Nor can fate more than part us thus, whose hearts are one in heaven ;
But God will cheer and comfort thee, when I am far from hence,
He knows thy gentle nature well,-our child's pure innocence !

Oh thou art fair as Beauty's self, thou hast its beaming eye,
Its chasten'd flush upon thy cheek, to shame the rose's dye;
Its parting lips, its polish'd brow, with cluster'd ringlets fair,
Its jimpy waist, its angel form, its meek retiring air.

But these are graces which by mind's pure worth are far surpass'd;
I met thee as an angel first, as such we'll part at last :

Each faultless feature, Love, was thine, but all I felt was given,
In these were traces of the earth, which kept thee back from heaven.

Farewell once more; I dare not think, and only know that I
Must court this worthless world's false smile beneath another sky;
But though my steps be chain'd, my love, my fancy will be free,
And oft will visit in its dreams this home, my child, and thee.

My Mary, couldst thou see this heart, thou'dst find engraven there
An image of thy gentle self; a fond, fond husband's prayer:
The world is harsh, and thou art kind-is rude, and thou alone,
And thou, I fear, must weep, my love, must weep when I am gone!

But heaven will guard thee; and this pledge, our young and beauteous boy,
Will serve to lead his mother's heart by tender hopes to joy;

And a time is coming yet, when I will strain thee to my heart,-
An hour when we will meet again, and never more to part!

Yes, Mary, even through my tears, methinks afar I see
A quiet spot 'midst our native hills, a cottage on a lea:
The brawling of a stream is heard, the noise of humming bees,
The laugh of happy voices from a clump of neighboring trees!

A halo hovers o'er that spot-there's peace around, above;
Contentment there is join'd in joy to ever faithful love:

There all they sought is found at length, and all they hoped is given,
They live for mutual bliss alone, and only wait for heaven!

TO" BEAUTY."

THE morn is up! wake, Beauty, wake!
The flower is on the lea,
The blackbird sings within the brake,
The thrush is on the tree;
Forth to the balmy fields repair,
And let the breezes mild
Lift from thy brow the falling hair,
And fan my little child-
Yet if thy step be 'mid the dews,
Beauty! be sure to change your shoes!

"Tis noon! the butterfly springs up,
High from her couch of rest,
And scorns the little blue-bell cup
Which all night long she press'd.
Away! we'll seek the walnut's shade,

And pass the sunny hour,
The bee within the rose is laid,

And veils him in the flower;
Mark not the lustre of his wing,
Beauty! be careful of his sting!

'Tis eve! but the retiring ray
A halo deigns to cast
Round scenes on which it shone all day,
And gilds them to the last;
Thus, ere thine eyelids close in sleep,
Let Memory deign to flee
Far o'er the mountain and the deep,
To cast one beam on me!
Yes, Beauty! 'tis mine inmost prayer-
But don't forget to curl your hair!

MORAL OF A ROSE-LEAF.

WHEN a daffadill I see,

Hanging down his head t'wards me,
Guesse I may what I must be :
First, I shall decline my head;
Secondly, I shall be dead;
Lastly, safely buried.-HERRICK.

So sang a poet, whose writings bear all the ease and delicacy of "learned leisure," and yet betray his constant aptitude to moralize upon, and give a pithy turn to, matters in themselves frequently vulgar and of every day Occurrence. His spirit appears to have been always on the watch to strike out a moral, or a pretty gleam of poetry, from even a pebble on the road-side. He would have worked the following touching paragraph into innumerable beauties, begetting "a hundred similes," and each a glittering coin for the exchequer of Apollo.

Amongst a great many miracles attributed to Abdul Radir Ghilan, the founder of the order of the Kalandi, is the following; which, however, if ît do not savor much of the miraculous, at least discovers an aptness and delicacy of imagination, not always to be found in the opium-loving Mahometan. It is related that Abdul Radir Ghilan, once coming to Babylon, to inhabit amongst the other superstitious persons and santones (a gross epicurean order) of that city, they hearing of his approach, went forth to meet him, one of them carrying in his hand a dish filled with water; from whence they would infer, that as that dish was full to the brim, so as to be capable of containing no more, so their city was so replenished with learned and religious persons, that there was no place to receive him: whereupon our sagacious Abdul, being desirous of confuting this hieroglyphic, whereby they would excuse the courtesy of due hospitality, stretched his arms first towards heaven, and then bowed down and gathered a rose-leaf, which he laid on the water, then almost overflowing the dish. Now Abdul, by this piece of ingenuity not only con

futed the parable of the churlish and sordid Babylonians, but also so impressed them with a sense of his greatness, that they registered the effort of Abdul as a miracle of wisdom, and, bringing him into their city with triumph, made him the superior of all their orders.

We might very reasonably make the above incident serve as an every-day memento-a record to spur us on to moral and

intellectual cultivation. How frequently do we proceed more than half way towards the completion of a valuable undertaking, when, making a sudden halt, we think enough has been done, imagining further effort useless, and even impossible. Our endeavors, like the dish full of water, are rising to the brim; they seem completed to overrunning, and yet they would bear something-a rose-leaf placed upon them would make our triumph most complete. Is it sufficient that we give excellent advice to those who "the primrose paths of dalliance tread," is it sufficient that we steep them to the very lips in apophthegm and moral exhortations? No, there yet wants something to crown the laborthe rose-leaf of example. We may hastily pass an object of charity, and with our best wishes to alleviate the sufferings of the unfortunate, suffer not ourselves to take the trouble of retracing our path to confront the petitioner. Oh, what are charitable feelings, although overflowing the heart, unless they bear upon them something else than theoretical benevolence!-let us place upon them the odorous rose-leaf of practice. When the bigotry, the persecution, the uncharitableness of mankind is poured down upon some devoted head, let us not mingle in the overwhelming torrent, let us not add

to its strength, but yield up a sweet and cheering offering, the rose-leaf of compassion. When we feel ourselves sinking beneath the waters of affliction, let us not give ourselves, with reckless indifference, to the potency of that which oppresses us; but rather let the beauty and the perfume of Hope be seen in the rose-leaf upon the flood, a leaf in which our spirit may sail securely, although the lightning flashes from above, and the earth trembles from beneath.

We might pursue this subject to any length, without the fear of being charged with repetition, from a want of apt

similitudes. The matter is a most fertile and beautiful one; but we proffer it thus briefly, that it may excite useful reflection, rather than by a needless verbosity out-weary it. A simple stone, the record of a sentence, will sometimes awaken deeper attention than a gigantic edifice, and a finely-turned homily. The brief exhortation, "Remember thou art a man," must sometimes have reached, with greater force, the heart of the monarch of old, than if he had assembled his priests, his magii, and his soothsayers, to hold forth on the state of mortality, and on all earth's vanities.

CHARACTERS OF CONTEMPORARY FOREIGN AUTHORS AND

STATESMEN.

No. I-LE VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND; PEER OF FRANCE, AND MEMBER OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY.

THE ancients, who loved to find the marvellous in all the productions of nature, made the cameleon the symbol of versatility. The moderns, going still farther, adopted the name of this reptile to express by a single word all sorts of infidelity, sycophancy, and change. The cameleon changes its color and form, almost instantaneously, according to the bodies by which it is surrounded. The cameleon was, therefore, the portrait of those persons who, in changing their color, do not wait till that of yesterday be thoroughly obliterated before they put on that of to-day. They are not

off with the old love Before they are on with the new. Thus the most innocent of animals brought to mind the last degree of human baseness-thus the most inoffensive, the least ambitious of created beings beheld its name become the emblem of the apostacy of the Talleyrands, the Chabrols, the Cuviers, the Laplaces, the Soults, the Lauristons, and of that famous Chateaubriand, republican and philosopher at the beginning of his career, monarchical and Catholic in his maturity-Bonapartist under the empire, royalist after the

restoration-the friend of despotism when in power, the defender of liberty when in disgrace—and, according to the circumstances of the moment, forging weapons, in the Journal des Débats, for the independence of the people, or the despotism of kings.

Disturbed by a restless imagination, by a precocious taste for an adventurous life, it was "with delight" that Chateaubriand "wandered" over our globe. He traversed wide oceans→→→→ he dwelled in the hut of the savage, and in the palaces of kings-in the city and in the camp. A traveller in the plains of Greece, a pilgrim to the shrines of Jerusalem, he "seated himself on all sorts of ruins." He beheld the kingdom of Louis XVI. and the empire of Bonaparte pass away. He shared the exile of the Bourbons, and announced their return. " Two weights which seemed to be appended to his fortune" caused it successively to rise and sink in equal proportions. He is taken up-he is abandoned—he is taken up again ;-stripped to-day, he is clothed to-morrow, for the purpose of being stripped again. Accustomed to these "squalls"-in whatever port he arrives, he considers himself as a navigator who will soon put to sea again,

who "makes no permanent establishment on land." Two hours, he tells us, were sufficient for him to quit the ministry, and to give up the keys of the official residence to his successor; and two hours will have been enough for him to make peace with the men who turned him out, and who now have appointed him ambassador to Rome.

Men gifted with a vivid imagination are more ready than others to throw themselves now into one party, now into another; and to disclaim to-morrow the opinion of to-day. They speak and write always rather under the inspiration of the moment, than from a matured and digested conviction concerning men and things. And what renders this versatility, in some sort, excusable, is, that they are always in earnest and good faith, for they are always the dupes of their imagination. Monsieur de Chateaubriand is one of these. He has said in his Génie du Christianisme, "that the history of great writers is to be found in their works; that we paint well only our own heart, in attributing it to another-and that the best part of genius consists in its recollections." He has proved this truth by his own writings. His different works are full of the recollections of his life-they state, if they do not explain, the different metamorphoses of the noble Viscount; they are, so to speak, the "itinerary" of his historythe "diary" of his changing opinionsthe picture of his "fluctuating" conduct, since the revolution.

The gloomy romance of Réné, in which are visible the character and some of the adventures of the author, is stamped with that spirit of mysticism which Chateaubriand manifested from his very earliest years. But, soon disgusted with the profession of the church, to which his mother destined him, he went to America. Here, he penetrated far into the immense solitudes of the New World. He "wandered with delight" in the majestic forests inhabited by the Natchez, and raised his style to the level of the grandeur of the pictures which unfolded themselves before his eyes. He

saw Washington; and "as there is virtue in the looks of a great man," he imbibed those principles of republicanism and philosophy which he afterwards developed in the work he published in London, during his emigration, under the title of "An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Ancient and Modern Revolutions, considered with reference to the French Revolution." But "two voices having issued from the grave, a death, which became the interpreter of death, having stricken him," M. de Chateaubriand, like another Magdalen, repented-and became Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman. He published the interesting episode of Atala, in the Mercure, of which he was one of the proprietors, "as a bait to seduce people to read the Génie du Christianisme," which appeared a year afterwards, when Bonaparte wished to make himself an absolute and most Christian king. The Génie du Christianisme, a mixture of some sublime parts with ridiculous and tedious disquisitions, obtained, at its first appearance, a prodigious success. Patronised and cried up to the skies by the booksellers, the blues, and the sentimentalists, M. de Chateaubriand became immediately a personage of importance. He celebrated "the man sent by Providence as a sign of reconciliation, when it was weary of punishing" and "the man of Providence," then First Consul, chose the author of the Christianisme to accompany Cardinal Fesch, as Secretary of Embassy to the court of Rome.

Atala had been the foundation of M. de Chateaubriand's fortune; and, some time after his arrival at Rome, M. de Chateaubriand being godfather to a girl, gave her, in the spirit of gratitude, the name of Atala. It is said that the priest refused to baptise her by this name; that M. de Chateaubriand insisted with all the obstinacy of an author, and all the pride of an ambassador; and that he complained to the cardinal, who was of the opinion of the priest. It is further said that, in the course of the discussion, M. de Chateaubriand, indignant that such a difficulty should be raised, expressed

"Behimself in a very free manner. tween ourselves," he said to the cardinal, "your Eminence must know very well that there is but a slight difference between Atala and all the other female saints,"- -a position in which the cardinal was far from coinciding.

This independence in matters of religion did not last long; and it was, doubtless, as an expiation of this sin against sacred things, that he who had proclaimed that "there was nothing beautiful, or good, or great in life except in things mysterious," took up the cross, and, a modern palatine, made, alone and penitent, a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre. Chateaubriand went by Italy and Greece, traversed Turkey, and arrived at Jerusalem towards the end of 1806. After having, in the course of his journey, had the honor of singing, "Ah! vous dirais-je, maman !" at the wedding of Mademoiselle Pengali, and the satisfaction of "flogging a Janissary," and "burning the moustache of a sophi with the priming of a pistol," he returned to his country laden with a dozen pebbles of Sparta, Argos, and Corinth, a chaplet, a little bottle of the water of the Jordan, a phial of that of the Dead Sea, some reeds gathered on the banks of the Nile, and the manuscript of his Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem. In this work there are some magnificent descriptions, overlaid by a mass of adventures, some curious, but for the most part commonplace; by the side of pages of a pure and elegant style, are whole chapters of the merest gossiping; and great and just ideas are vitiated by paradoxes as anti-social, as anti-philosophical, and as anti-religious as the following:

-"It is to the system of slavery that the superiority of the ancients over ourselves is to be attributed."

It was the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, in which M. de Chateaubriand had inserted some sentences about military glory, which reconciled the great writer with the hero of the age; and which caused the latter to forget the noble indignation which the poet 4 ATHENEUM, VOL. 1, 3d series.

33

It

had betrayed at the news of the assas-
sination of the Duc d'Enghien.
also opened to the author of Atala the
doors of the Academy, where he took
his seat, insulting the memory of his
predecessor, the illustrious and repub-
lican Chénier. But he had been also
a somewhat severe censor of Atala,
and a poet of wit, whose satire, "Les
Nouveaux Saints," had, some years
before, wounded the vanity, and dis-
turbed the conscience, of the author
of the Génie du Christianisme.

It was when fortune seemed to be
preparing to desert the banners of the
man of the 18th Brumaire, that the
In this audacious
new academician delivered his philip-
pic against Chénier.
discourse, he dared, under the eyes of
the despot, to discuss the restoration
of the monarchy, and the trial of Louis
XVI.

Napoleon read the discourse, prohibited its publication, and, in his indignation, let fall these words, so characteristic of the dispositions of the fortunate soldier who then govern"Since when has the ed France. Institute allowed itself to become a political assembly? Let them make verses, and play the censors of the language, but let them not stir beyond go back the territory of the Muses, or I shall know well how to make them to it. If M. de Chateaubriand is mad, there are lunatic asylums to receive him. Are we, then, bandits, and am I only an usurper? I have dethroned no one. I picked up the crown from the kennel, and the people placed it upon my head. Let its acts be respected!"

The friends of M. de Chateaubriand were alarmed; and the poet himself, having read in these expressions the downfall of his brilliant future, devoted his services to the cause of legitimacy, which he had till then neglected, and to the triumph of which the disasters of Napoleon seemed to give some likelihood.

The composition, entitled On Bonaparte and the Bourbons, in which the fallen idol is torn to pieces without mercy, displayed Chateaubriand one of the most devoted and ardent partisans of the government which fo

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