Hear me, Oh hear while I impart

The deep conviction of my heart, That such a theatre august and grand,

Whose author, actors, awful play,

Are God, mankind, a judgment day,

Was for some higher aim, some holier purpose plann'd.

I will not, nay I cannot, deem

This fair Creation's moral scheme,

That seems so crude, mysterious, misapplied,

Meant to conclude as it began,

Unworthy the material plan

With whose perfections rare its failures are allied.

As in our individual fate,

Our manhood and maturer date,

Correct the faults and follies of our youth,

So will the world, I fondly hope,

With added years give fuller scope

To the display and love of wisdom, justice, truth.

"Tis this that makes my feelings glow,

My bosom thrill, my tears o'erflow,

At any deed magnanimous-sublime;

"Tis this that re-assures my soul,

When nations shun the forward goal,

And retrograde awhile in ignorance and crime.

Mine is no hopeless dream of some

Impeccable Millennium,

When saints and angels shall inhabit earth;

But a conviction deep, intense,

That man was meant by Providence Progressively to reach a higher moral worth.

On this dear faith's sustaining truth

Hath my soul brooded from its youth,

As heaven's best gift, and earth's most cheering dower.

Oh! may I still, in life's decline,

Hold unimpair'd this creed benign,

And mine old age attest its meliorating power!

GIPSIES.

WHETHER from India's burning plains,

Or wild Bohemia's domains,

Your steps were first directed;

Or whether ye be Egypt's sons,

Whose stream, like Nile's, for ever runs

With sources undetected:

Arabs of Europe! Gipsy race!

Your Eastern manners, garb, and face

Appear a strange chimera;

None, none but you can now be styled

Romantic, picturesque, and wild,

In this prosaic era.

Ye sole freebooters of the wood,

Since Adam Bell and Robin Hood:

Kept everywhere asunder

From other tribes,-King, Church, and State Spurning, and only dedicate

To freedom, sloth, and plunder;

Your forest-camp,-the forms one sees

Banditti-like amid the trees,

The ragged donkeys grazing,

The Sybil's eye prophetic, bright

With flashes of the fitful light

Beneath the caldron blazing,

O'er my young mind strange terrors threw :

Thy History gave me, Moore Carew!

A more exalted notion

Of Gipsy life; nor can I yet

Gaze on your tents, and quite forget

My former deep emotion.

For "auld lang syne" I'll not maltreat

Yon pseudo-tinker, though the cheat,

As sly as thievish Reynard, Instead of mending kettles, prowls,

To make foul havoc of my fowls,

And decimate my hen-yard.

Come thou, too, black-eyed lass, and try

That potent skill in palmistry,

Which sixpences can wheedle;

Mine is a friendly cottage-here

No snarling mastiff need you fear,

No Constable or Beadle.

'Tis yours, I know, to draw at will

Upon futurity a bill,

And Plutus to importune;

Discount the bill-take half yourself,

Give me the balance of the pelf,

And both may laugh at fortune.